English

Accretion Rates of Red Quasars from the Hydrogen P$\beta$ line

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-10-15 v1

Abstract

Red quasars are thought to be an intermediate population between merger-driven star-forming galaxies in dust-enshrouded phase and normal quasars. If so, they are expected to have high accretion ratios, but their intrinsic dust extinction hampers reliable determination of Eddington ratios. Here, we compare the accretion rates of 16 red quasars at z0.7z \sim 0.7 to those of normal type 1 quasars at the same redshift range. The red quasars are selected by their red colors in optical through near-infrared (NIR) and radio detection. The accretion rates of the red quasars are derived from the Pβ\beta line in NIR spectra, which is obtained by the SpeX on the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in order to avoid the effects of dust extinction. We find that the measured Eddington ratios (LbolL_{\rm bol}/LEdd0.69L_{\rm Edd} \simeq 0.69) of red quasars are significantly higher than those of normal type 1 quasars, which is consistent with a scenario in which red quasars are the intermediate population and the black holes of red quasars grow very rapidly during such a stage.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.03887,
  title  = {Accretion Rates of Red Quasars from the Hydrogen P$\beta$ line},
  author = {Dohyeong Kim and Myungshin Im and Eilat Glikman and Jong-Hak Woo and Tanya Urrutia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.03887},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. Published in ApJ