We present a search for bright z∼5 quasars using imaging data from SkyMapper Southern Survey, Pan-STARRS1 and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We select two sets of candidates using WISE with optical bands from SkyMapper and alternatively from Pan-STARRS1, limited to a magnitude of i<18.2. We follow up several candidates with spectroscopy and find that the four candidates common to both lists are quasars, while others turned out to be cool stars. Two of the four quasars, SMSS J013539.27-212628.4 at z=4.86 and SMSS J093032.58-221207.7 at z=4.94, are new discoveries and ranked among the dozen brightest known z>4.5 QSOs in the i-band.
@article{arxiv.1805.03429,
title = {Discovery of two bright $z\sim5$ quasars with SkyMapper, Pan-STARRS1 and WISE},
author = {Zefeng Li and Christian Wolf and Fuyan Bian and Christopher A. Onken and Brian P. Schmidt and Patrick Tisserand and Noura Alonzi and Wei Jeat Hon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.03429},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures; submitted to PASA, couple of typos fixed in the arXiv version