The Pan-STARRS1 distant z > 5.6 quasar survey: More than 100 quasars within the first GYR of the universe
- Max Planck Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, D-69117, Heidelberg (Germany)
- Steward Observatory, The University of Arizona, 933 North Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721–0065 (United States)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
- Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
- Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing 100871 (China)
- MIT-Kavli Center for Astrophysics and Space Research, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 (United States)
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1205 W. Clark Street, Urbana, IL 61801 (United States)
- Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
- Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Giessenbachstrasse 1, D-85748 Garching (Germany)
Luminous quasars at z>5.6 can be studied in detail with the current generation of telescopes and provide us with unique information on the first gigayear of the universe. Thus far, these studies have been statistically limited by the number of quasars known at these redshifts. Such quasars are rare, and therefore, wide-field surveys are required to identify them, and multiwavelength data are required to separate them efficiently from their main contaminants, the far more numerous cool dwarfs. In this paper, we update and extend the selection for the z∼6 quasars presented in Bañados et al. (2014) using the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) survey. We present the PS1 distant quasar sample, which currently consists of 124 quasars in the redshift range 5.6≲z≲6.7 that satisfy our selection criteria. Of these quasars, 77 have been discovered with PS1, and 63 of them are newly identified in this paper. We present the composite spectra of the PS1 distant quasar sample. This sample spans a factor of ∼20 in luminosity and shows a variety of emission line properties. The number of quasars at z>5.6 presented in this work almost doubles the previously known quasars at these redshifts, marking a transition phase from studies of individual sources to statistical studies of the high-redshift quasar population, which was impossible with earlier, smaller samples.
- OSTI ID:
- 22872464
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 227; ISSN 0067-0049; ISSN APJSA2
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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