The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: twelfth data release
Abstract
We present the Data Release 12 Quasar catalog (DR12Q) from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the SDSS-III. This catalog includes all SDSS-III/BOSS objects that were spectroscopically targeted as quasar candidates during the full survey and that are confirmed as quasars via visual inspection of the spectra, have luminosities Mi[z=2]<-20.5 (in a LCDM cosmology with H_0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, Omega_M = 0.3, and Omega _L=0.7), and either display at least one emission line with a full width at half maximum (FWHM)larger than 500 km/s or, if not, have interesting/complex absorption features. The catalog also includes previously known quasars (mostly from SDSS-I and II) that were reobserved by BOSS. The catalog contains 297,301 quasars detected over 9,376 square degrees with robust identification and redshift measured by a combination of principal component eigenspectra. The number of quasars with z>2.15 is about an order of magnitude greater than the number of z>2.15 quasars known prior to BOSS. Redshifts and FWHMs are provided for the strongest emission lines (CIV, CIII], MgII). The catalog identifies 29,580 broad absorption line quasars and lists their characteristics. For each object, the catalog presents five-band (u, g, r, i, z) CCD-based photometry together with some information on the optical morphology and the selection criteria. When available, the catalog also provides information on the optical variability of quasars using SDSS and PTF multi-epoch photometry. 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, covering the wavelength region 3,600-10,500A at a spectral resolution in the range 1,300<R<2,500, can be retrieved from the SDSS Catalog Archive Server.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1608.06483,
title = {The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: twelfth data release},
author = {Isabelle Pâris and Patrick Petitjean and Nicholas P. Ross and Adam D. Myers and Éric Aubourg and Alina Streblyanska and Stephen Bailey and Éric Armengaud and Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille and Christophe Yèche and Fred Hamann and Michael A. Strauss and Franco D. Albareti and Jo Bovy and Dmitry Bizyaev and W. Niel Brandt and Marcella Brusa and Johannes Buchner and Johan Comparat and Rupert A. C. Croft and Tom Dwelly and Xiaohui Fan and Andreu Font-Ribera and Jian Ge and Antonis Georgakakis and Patrick B. Hall and Linhua Jian and Karen Kinemuchi and Elena Malanushenko and Viktor Malanushenko and Richard G. McMahon and Marie-Luise Menzel and Andrea Merloni and Kirpal Nandra and Pasquier Noterdaeme and Daniel Oravetz and Kaike Pan and Matthew M. Pieri and Francisco Prada and Mara Salvato and David J. Schlegel and Donald P. Schneider and Audrey Simmons and Matteo Viel and David H. Weinberg and Liu Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.06483},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in A&A. The catalog is publicly available here: http://www.sdss.org/dr12/algorithms/boss-dr12-quasar-catalog