Related papers: Pending problems in QSOs
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the effective beginning of large, systematic redshift surveys of galaxies. These surveys have had a major impact on observational cosmology and on our current understanding of large-scale structures…
Radio pulsars have been responsible for many astonishing astrophysical and fundamental physics breakthroughs since their discovery 50 years ago. In this review I will discuss many of the highlights, most of which were only possible because…
Quasars represent a brief phase in the life-cycle of most massive galaxies, but the evolutionary connection between central black holes and their host galaxies remains unclear. While quasars are active and shining brighter than the…
Over the past decades, nearly a million quasars have been explored to shed light on the evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies. The ultraviolet-to-optical spectra of type-1 quasars particularly offer insights into their black…
The standard cosmological model, now strongly constrained by direct observation at early epochs, is very successful in describing the structure of the evolved universe on large and intermediate scales. Unfortunately, serious contradictions…
Quasar absorption lines provide detailed information on the chemical, kinematic, and ionization conditions in galaxies and their environments, and provide a means for studying the evolution of these conditions back to the epoch of the first…
While there has been significant progress in our understanding of the origin and evolu-tion of planetary nebulae in the last 50 years, there remain several unsolved problems. These include the true 3D morphological structure of the nebulae,…
The cosmological constant problem represents an evident tension between our present description of gravity and particle physics. Many solutions have been proposed, but experimental tests are always difficult or impossible to perform and…
The accretion of a cloud of hydrogen at the surface of a small, heavy star produces a high energy mostly dissipated by electromagnetic radiation. The combination of the absorption and the redshift of this radiation by hydrogen explains all…
The mechanism by which the supermassive black holes that power bright quasars at high redshift form remains unknown. One possibility is that ... the monolithic collapse of a massive protogalactic disc ... leads to the formation of a…
There is controversy about the measurement of statistical associations between bright quasars and faint, presumably foreground galaxies. We look at the distribution of galaxies around an unbiased sample of 63 bright, moderate redshift…
BAL QSOs are notoriously faint X-ray sources, presumably due to extreme intrinsic absorption. However, several objects have begun to appear through the obscuration with recent X-ray observations by Chandra and ASCA. Where enough counts are…
The discovery of high redshift quasars represents a challenge to the origin of supermassive black holes. Here, two evolutionary scenarios are considered. The first one concerns massive black holes in the local universe, which in a large…
We report the discovery of the first known probable case of a physical triple quasar (not a gravitational lens). A previously known double system, QQ 1429-008 at z = 2.076, is shown to contain a third, fainter QSO component at the same…
QSOs allow study of the evolution of the relationship between black holes in galactic nuclei and their host galaxies. The black hole mass can be derived from the widths of the broad emission lines, and the stellar velocity dispersion…
We discuss a simple model for the growth of supermassive black holes (BHs) at the center of spheroidal stellar systems. In particular, we assess the hypotheses that (1) star formation in spheroids and BH fueling are proportional to one…
The QSO luminosity function at z>5 provides strong constraints on models of joint evolution of QSO and their hosts. However, these observations are challenging because the low space densities of these objects necessitate surveying of large…
Lyman-alpha forest data probing the post-reionization Universe shows surprisingly large opacity fluctuations over rather large ($\ge$50 comoving Mpc/h) spatial scales. We model these fluctuations using a hybrid approach utilizing the large…
We have observed nine QSOs with redshifts 0.85 to 4.16 at near-IR wavelengths with the adaptive optics bonnette of the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. Exposure times ranged from 1500 to 24000s (mostly near 7000s) in J, H, or K bands, with…
Obscuration in quasars may arise from steep viewing angles along the dusty torus, or instead may represent a distinct phase of supermassive black hole growth. We test these scenarios by probing the host dark matter halo environments of…