Related papers: Narrow absorption line variability in repeat quasa…
We measure quasar variability using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 Survey (Pan-STARRS1 or PS1) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and establish a method of selecting quasars via their variability in 10,000…
We present cosmological results from the statistics of lensed quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Quasar Lens Search. By taking proper account of the selection function, we compute the expected number of quasars lensed by…
Damped Ly-alpha absorbers (DLAs) are a well-studied class of absorption line systems, and yet the properties of their host galaxies remain largely unknown. To investigate the origin of these systems, we have conducted an imaging survey of…
We investigate the NV absorption signal along the line of sight of background quasars, in order to test the robustness of the use of this ion as criterion to select intrinsic (i.e. physically related to the quasar host galaxy) narrow…
We present the fifth edition of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Quasar Catalog, which is based upon the SDSS Seventh Data Release. The catalog, which contains 105,783 spectroscopically confirmed quasars, represents the conclusion of the…
We present a sample of 218 new quasar pairs with proper transverse separations R_prop < 1 Mpc/h over the redshift range 0.5 < z < 3.0, discovered from an extensive follow up campaign to find companions around the Sloan Digital Sky Survey…
The extraordinarily bright quasar PHL 1811 at a redshift z = 0.192 provides an attractive opportunity to use ultraviolet absorption-line spectroscopy to study the properties of gas systems in the local universe. An R = 20,000 far-UV…
We explore reprocessing models for a sample of 17 hypervariable quasars, taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project, which all show coordinated optical luminosity hypervariability with amplitudes of…
We present a catalog of 100,563 unresolved, UV-excess (UVX) quasar candidates to g=21 from 2099 deg^2 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release One (DR1) imaging data. Existing spectra of 22,737 sources reveals that 22,191 (97.6%)…
We discover the significant (significance level of >99%) correlations between the fractional variation of the ionizing continuum and that of the C IV and/or Si IV BALs in each of 21 BAL quasars that have at least five-epoch observations…
Using the radio observations by FIRST and NVSS, we build a sample of 151 radio variable quasars selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 3 (SDSS DR3). Six (probably another two) among them are classified as broad absorption…
We present 21 examples of C IV Broad Absorption Line (BAL) trough disappearance in 19 quasars selected from systematic multi-epoch observations of 582 bright BAL quasars (1.9 < z < 4.5) by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-I/II (SDSS-I/II) and…
We discover that some of the broad absorption lines (BALs) are actually a complex of narrow absorption lines (NALs). As a pilot study of this type of BAL, we show this discovery through a typical example in this paper. Utilizing the…
We present deep ground based imaging of the environments of five QSOs that contain sub-Damped Lyman-alpha systems at z<1 with the SOAR telescope and SOI camera. We detect a clear surplus of galaxies in these small fields, supporting the…
We investigate the time-dependent variations of ultraviolet (UV) black hole mass estimates of quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). From SDSS spectra of 615 high-redshift (1.69 < z < 4.75) quasars with spectra from two epochs, we…
We present a new method to measure the episodic lifetime of quasars with current and future large-scale sky surveys. Future photometric observations of large samples of confirmed quasars can provide a direct measurement (or interesting…
For the first time spectroscopic galaxy redshift surveys are reaching the scales where galaxies can be studied together with the nearest quasars. This gives an opportunity to study the dependence between the activity of a quasar and its…
Reverberation mapping of nearby active galactic nuclei has led to estimates of broad-line-region (BLR) sizes and central-object masses for some 37 objects to date. However, successful reverberation mapping has yet to be performed for…
Repeat scans by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) of a 278 square degree stripe along the Celestial equator have yielded an average of over 10 observations each for nearly 8,000 spectroscopically confirmed quasars. Over 2500 of these…
We present radio and X-ray observations, as well as optical light curves, for a subset of 26 BL Lac candidates from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) lacking strong radio emission and with z<2.2. Half of these 26 objects are shown to be…