Properties of Radio-selected Broad Absorption Line Quasars from the First Bright Quasar Survey

By Robert H. Becker, R. White, M. Gregg, M. Brotherton, S. Laurent-Muehleisen, N. Arav. 2000

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a spectroscopic follow-up to the VLA FIRST survey, the FIRST Bright Quasar Survey (FBQS) has found 29 radio-selected broad absorption line (BAL) quasars. This sample provides the first opportunity to study the properties of radio-selected BAL quasars. Contrary to most previous studies, we establish that a significant population of radio-loud BAL quasars exists. Radio-selected BAL quasars display compact radio morphologies and possess both steep and flat radio spectra. Quasars with low-ionization BALs have a color distribution redder than that of the FBQS sample as a whole. The frequency of BAL quasars in the FBQS is significantly greater, perhaps by as much as a factor of 2, than that inferred from optically selected samples. The frequency of BAL quasars appears to have a complex dependence on radio loudness. The properties of this sample appear to be inconsistent with simple unified models in which BAL quasars constitute a subset of quasars seen edge-on.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/490587dec78058a557a0292483cb9ea8a40bd25e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Schneider
2. J. Brinkmann
3. L. Hernquist
4. Gordon Richards
5. M. Strauss
6. P. Hopkins
7. M. Blanton
8. Xiaohui Fan

In Instrumentation

1. D. Schneider
2. J. Brinkmann
3. Gordon Richards
4. M. Blanton
5. L. Hernquist
6. M. Strauss
7. P. Hopkins
8. T. Heckman

Citations in the corpus

• Continuum and Emission-Line Properties of Broad Absorption Line Quasars (2003, background): “In addition, radio (e.g., Becker et al. 2000, 2001), X-ray (e.g., Gallagher et al. 2002), and rest-frame optical (e.g., Boroson 2002) observations of BALQSOs have provided important clues regarding the nature of the BAL phenomenon.”
• Evidence of a high-velocity ionized outflow in a second narrow-line quasar PG 0844+349 (2003, unknown): “This invites the further intriguing speculation that accretion at (or above) the Eddington rate is equally common, extending the suggestion by Becker et al. (2000) who proposed that BAL objects may be young or have recently been fuelled.”
• Composite Spectra from the FIRST Bright Quasar Survey (2000, methodology): “Note that we have erred on the side of inclusivity, as discussed by Becker et al. (2000), and included several confirmed and probable BAL quasars that do not meet the criterion of positive BALnicity index (Weymann et al. 1991), e.g.”
• A Catalog of Broad Absorption Line Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release (2003, background): “It has been suggested that some or all BALQSOs may be a unique class of quasars (Surdej & Hutsemekers 1987), perhaps in a different stage of their life cycle (Hazard et al. 1984, Boroson & Meyers 1992, Becker et al. 2000).”
• Broad Emission-Line Shifts in Quasars: An Orientation Measure for Radio-Quiet Quasars? (2002, result): “These correlations would seem to be inconsistent with, but do not necessarily rule out, the idea that BALs may (also) be an evolutionary stage of all quasars (Becker et al. 2000).”
• Supercritical Accretion Flows around Black Holes: Two-dimensional, Radiation Pressure-dominated Disks with Photon Trapping (2005, background): “Such blueshifted absorption in high-ionization lines was observed in the UV spectra of broad absorption line quasars (Weymann, Carswell, & Smith 1981; Becker et al. 2000).”
• A high-velocity ionized outflow and XUV photosphere in the narrow emission line quasar PG1211+143 (2003, background): “%) of radio-loud BAL quasars in the VLA FIRST survey bright quasar survey (Becker et al. 2000).”
• Red and Reddened Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, background): “…that BALQSOs, especially low-ionization BALs (LoBALs), are redder than the average quasar (Sprayberry & Foltz 1992; Yamamoto & Vansevičius 1999; Becker et al. 2000; Najita, Dey, & Brotherton 2000; Brotherton et al. 2001; Hall et al. 2002a; Reichard et al. 2003b), likely as a result of…”
• A CATALOG OF BROAD ABSORPTION LINE QUASARS IN SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DATA RELEASE 5 (2008, result): “Our estimated BAL fraction agrees reasonably well with those from surveys of QSOs identified in other wavebands such as the radio (18 ± 4%; Becker et al. 2000) and infrared (20 ± 2%; see Section 6 of Dai et al. 2008).”
• The Frequency and Radio Properties of Broad Absorption Line Quasars (2003, methodology): “The existence of this potentially important difference in the SEDs of the two classes of quasars has been challenged by Becker et al. (2000), who discuss the incidence of BALQSOs in the FBQS survey (White et al. 2000), concluding that ‘‘ The frequency of BALQSOs in the FBQS is significantly…”
• Unusual Broad Absorption Line Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2002, background): “The rare Iron LoBALs (FeLoBALs; Hazard et al. 1987; Cowie et al. 1994; Becker et al. 1997, 2000; Menou et al. 2001) also show absorption from excited fine-structure levels or excited atomic terms of Fe ii or Fe iii.27 A key feature of BAL outflows which has only recently been appreciated is that…”
• PS16dtm: A Tidal Disruption Event in a Narrow-line Seyfert 1 Galaxy (2017, background): “42+391405.2 (Dong et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2015), which is a broad absorption line quasar (BAL QSO; Becker et al. 2000), a class of AGN which show some similarities to NLS1s (Grupe & Nousek 2015).”
• Quasi-Stellar Objects, Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies, and Mergers (2001, background): “The newly discovered class of lo-BAL quasars of moderate radio luminosity (Becker et al. 2000) shows that, in this scenario, radio-loud objects can indeed undergo an outÑow phase.”