Binary Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Evidence for Excess Clustering on Small Scales

By J. Hennawi, M. Strauss, M. Oguri, N. Inada, Gordon Richards, B. Pindor, D. Schneider, Robert H. Becker, M. Gregg, P. Hall and 9 more. 2005

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We present a sample of 221 new quasar pairs with proper transverse separations Rprop < 1 h-1 Mpc over the redshift range 0.5 < z < 3.0, discovered from an extensive follow-up campaign to find companions around the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and 2dF QSO Redshift Survey quasars. This sample includes 26 new binary quasars with separations Rprop < 50 h-1 kpc (θ < 10″), more than doubling the number of such systems known. We define a statistical sample of binaries selected with homogeneous criteria and compute its selection function, taking into account sources of incompleteness. The first measurement of the quasar correlation function on scales 10 h-1 kpc < Rprop < 400 h-1 kpc is presented. For Rprop ≲ 40 h-1 kpc, we detect an order of magnitude excess clustering over the expectation from the large-scale (Rprop ≳ 3 h-1 Mpc) quasar correlation function, extrapolated down as a power law (γ = 1.53) to the separations probed by our binaries. The excess grows to ∼30 at Rprop ∼ 10 h-1 kpc and provides compelling evidence that the quasar autocorrelation function gets progressively steeper on submegaparsec scales. This small-scale excess can likely be attributed to dissipative interaction events that trigger quasar activity in rich environments. Recent small-scale measurements of galaxy clustering and quasar-galaxy clustering are reviewed and discussed in relation to our measurement of small-scale quasar clustering.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f5e8020fc400f966388fe2ce5cf8f30d7e7deb2

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Citations in the corpus

THINK OUTSIDE THE COLOR BOX: PROBABILISTIC TARGET SELECTION AND THE SDSS-XDQSO QUASAR TARGETING CATALOG (2010, methodology): “…al. (2004) was used to measure the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect (Giannantonio et al. 2006, 2008) and cosmic magnification bias (Scranton et al. 2005a), and to study the clustering of quasars on large (Myers et al. 2006, 2007a) and small scales (Hennawi et al. 2006; Myers et al. 2007b, 2008).”
The DEEP3 Galaxy Redshift Survey: the impact of environment on the size evolution of massive early-type galaxies at intermediate redshift (2011, background): “…et al. 2006) find that quasars at 0.3 < z < 2.2 have a bias 2σ higher than that found by Coil et al. (2007), while Serber et al. (2006) find an excess of ∼L∗ galaxies on 25 kpc to 1 Mpc (h = 0.7) projected comoving scales around quasars at z < 0.4 (see also Hennawi et al. 2006; Myers et al. 2008).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY QUASAR CATALOG. V. SEVENTH DATA RELEASE (2010, background): “Most of the pairs are chance superpositions, but there are many sets whose components have similar redshifts, suggesting that the quasars may be physically associated (e.g., Hennawi et al. 2006).”
CLUSTERING OF LOW-REDSHIFT (z ⩽ 2.2) QUASARS FROM THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2008, background): “The quasar correlation function shows a small scale excess over a power law, and Hennawi et al. (2006) suggested that the small-scale excess can be at- tributed to dissipative interaction events that trigger quasar activity in rich environments.”
Clustering of High-Redshift (z ≥ 2.9) Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007, methodology): “Our sample cannot explore clustering below ∼ 1 h−1 Mpc because of fiber collisions; we are extending the methods of Hennawi et al. (2006a) to find close pairs of high-redshift quasars, to determine whether the excess clutering found at moderate redshift extends toz> 3.”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Fourteenth data release (2017, background): “The main science driver was studies of the quasar population through the measurement of their luminosity function (e.g. Richards et al. 2006) and clustering properties (e.g. Hennawi et al. 2006; Shen et al. 2007).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog. IV. Fifth Data Release (2007, background): “Hennawi et al. (2006) identified over 200 quasar pairs in the SDSS, primarily through spectroscopic observations of SDSS quasar candidates (based on photometric measurements) near known SDSS quasars; statistical arguments based on a correlation-function analysis suggests that most of these pairs…”
The quest for dual and binary supermassive black holes: A multi-messenger view (2019, background): “In the optical, the photometric and spectroscopic SDSS and BOSS surveys are vast databases that have been explored to search for pair candidates (e.g., Hennawi et al. 2006, 2010; Myers et al. 2008; Shen and Loeb 2010; Sandrinelli et al. 2014, 2018b; Lusso et al. 2018; Lena et al. 2018).”
QUASAR CLUSTERING FROM SDSS DR5: DEPENDENCES ON PHYSICAL PROPERTIES (2008, background): “Although serendipitous close pairs can be oserved on overlap plates (Hennawi et al. 2006), their completeness is poor in the SDSS main quasar sample.”
Quasars Probing Quasars. I. Optically Thick Absorbers near Luminous Quasars (2006, methodology): “Indeed, many of the projected quasar pairs shown in Figure 1 were selected from this catalog (see Hennawi et al. 2006).”
The clustering of intermediate-redshift quasars as measured by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (2012, methodology): “…recently included enough objects to study their clustering with some precision (Porciani, Magliocchetti & Norberg 2004; Croom et al. 2005; Porciani & Norberg 2006; Hennawi et al. 2006a; Myers et al. 2006, 2007a,b; da Angela et al. 2008; Padmanabhan et al. 2009; Ross et al. 2009; Shen et al. 2009).”
Minor Galaxy Interactions: Star Formation Rates and Galaxy Properties (2007, result): “Recent observational studies by Hennawi et al. (2006) and Serber et al. (2006) suggest that AGN activity is associated with local companions, in agreement with the numerical modeling of Kauffmann & Haehnelt (2000) and Hopkins et al. (2006).”