The Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasar catalog: tenth data release

Abstract

We present the Data Release 10 Quasar (DR10Q) catalog from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. The catalog includes all BOSS objects that were targeted as quasar candidates during the first 2.5 years of the survey and that are confirmed as quasars via visual inspection of the spectra, have luminosities M i [z = 2] < −20.5 (in a ΛCDM cosmology with H 0 = 70 km s −1 Mpc −1 , Ω M = 0.3, and Ω Λ = 0.7), and either display at least one emission line with a full width at half maximum (FWHM) larger than 500 km s −1 or, if not, have interesting/complex absorption features. The catalog also includes known quasars (mostly from SDSS-I and II) that were reobserved by BOSS. The catalog contains 166 583 quasars (74 454 are new discoveries since SDSS-DR9) detected over 6373 deg 2 with robust identification and redshift measured by a combination of principal component eigenspectra. The number of quasars with z > 2.15 (117 668) is ∼5 times greater than the number of z > 2.15 quasars known prior to BOSS. Redshifts and FWHMs are provided for the strongest emission lines (C iv, C iii, Mg ii). The catalog identifies 16 461 broad absorption line quasars and gives their characteristics. For each object, the catalog presents five-band (u, g, r, i, z) CCD-based photometry with typical accuracy of 0.03 mag and information on the optical morphology and selection method. The catalog also contains X-ray, ultraviolet, near-infrared, and radio emission properties of the quasars, when available, from other large-area surveys. The calibrated digital spectra cover the wavelength region 3600−10 500 Å at a spectral resolution in the range 1300 < R < 2500; the spectra can be retrieved from the SDSS Catalog Archive Server. We also provide a supplemental list of an additional 2376 quasars that have been identified among the galaxy targets of the SDSS-III/BOSS.

Evidence for Photoionization-Driven Broad Absorption Line Variability

“…It is known that the spectrophotometric calibration of SDSS has an uncertainty of about σ r = 0.05 mag in the SDSS I/II surveys (Abazajian et al 2009) and is considerably worse for BOSS spectra (Dawson et al 2013;Pâris et al 2014). However, as shown in the Appendix, the distribution of difference magnitudes between two epochs of our detected variable absorption-line quasars is considerably broader than possible calibration uncertainties.…”

“…We merged the quasar catalog of SDSS data release 7 (DR7; Schneider et al 2010) with that of DR10 (Pâris et al 2014). Duplicated entries are removed.…”

AN ULTRA-LUMINOUS QUASAR AT z = 5.363 WITH A TEN BILLION SOLAR MASS BLACK HOLE AND A METAL-RICH DLA AT z ∼ 5

“…The Sloan Digital Sky survey (SDSS; York et al 2000) and the SDSS-III Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (Dawson et al 2013) have provided the largest high-redshift quasar sample and resulted in the discovery of several hundred  z 4 quasars with bolometric luminosity of several  L 10 13 (Schneider et al 2010;Pâris et al 2014). The SDSS quasar sample has been used to study the quasar luminosity function (QLF; Richards et al 2006b;Ross et al 2013) and BH mass function (BHMF; Kelly et al 2010;Kelly & Shen 2013) at low and moderate redshifts.…”

Active Galactic Nuclei Search

“…We examined quasar samples obtained with three different methods: broadband optical photometry in combination with infrared and ultraviolet data (SDSS DR10, [7]), optical variability selection (BOSS + MMT, [6]) and X-ray data ( [2,8]). At large redshifts (z > 3), there is a decrease in the number of objects from the SDSS DR10 broadband photometry (Paris et al, 2013) and the BOSS + MMT sample ( [6]).…”