Related papers: The Intrinsic Quasar Luminosity Function: Accounti…

We present discovery observations of a quasar in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey (CFHQS) at redshift z=6.44. We also use near-IR spectroscopy of nine CFHQS quasars at z~6 to determine black hole masses. These are compared with…

We present results from a mini-survey of relatively high redshift (1.7 < z < 4) gravitationally lensed radio-quiet quasars observed with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and with XMM-Newton. The lensing magnification effect allows us to search…

We calculate the observable signature of a black hole accretion disk with a gap or hole created by a secondary black hole embedded in the disk. We find that for an interesting range of parameters of black hole masses (~10^6 to 10^9 solar…

We investigate the high-redshift quasar luminosity function (QLF) down to an apparent magnitude of I(AB) = 25 in the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). Careful analysis of the extensive COSMOS photometry and imaging data allows us to…

We combine a large set of quasar luminosity function (QLF) measurements from the rest-frame optical, soft and hard X-ray, and near- and mid-infrared bands to determine the bolometric QLF in the redshift interval z=0-6. Accounting for the…

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…

In this paper, we systematically investigate the optical appearance of a Schwarzschild black hole illuminated by three geometrically thin accretion disk models under varying observational inclination angles. Based on the geometric…

We study the axisymmetric, time-dependent hydrodynamics of rotating flows that are under the influence of supermassive black hole gravity and radiation from an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. This work is an extension of the…

Modeling the evolution of the number density distribution of quasars through the Quasar Luminosity Function (QLF) is critical to improve our understanding of the connection between black holes, galaxies and their halos. Here we present a…

Quasometry is precision measurement of celestial positions and apparent motion of very distant extragalactic objects, such as quasars, galactic nuclei, and QSOs. We use this term to identify a specific area of research, the methodology of…

Recently, a very large clustering length has been measured for quasars at a redshift of z~4. In combination with the observed quasar luminosity function we assess the implications of this clustering for the relationship between quasar…

In our second paper on long-term quasar variability, we employ a much larger database of quasars than in de Vries, Becker & White. This expanded sample, containing 35165 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 2, and 6413…

We explore the general question of correlations among different waveband luminosities in a flux-limited multiband observational data set. Such correlations, often observed for astronomical sources, may either be intrinsic or induced by the…

A sublimation process governs the innermost region of the dusty torus of active galactic nuclei. However, the observed inner radius of the torus is systematically smaller than the expected radius by a factor of ~ 1/3. We show that the…

A new method for measuring the shear induced by gravitational light deflection is proposed. It is based on analyzing the anisotropy induced in the auto-correlation function (ACF) of the extragalactic background light which is produced by…

We measure the anisotropy of dark matter flows on small scales in the near environment of haloes using a large set of simulations. We rely on two different approaches to quantify the anisotropy of the cosmic infall: we measure the flows at…

We present a joint estimate of the stellar/dark matter mass fraction in lens galaxies and the average size of the accretion disk of lensed quasars from microlensing measurements of 27 quasar image pairs seen through 19 lens galaxies. The…

Current X-ray observations and simulations show that gravitational lensing can be used to infer the structure near the event horizons of black holes, constrain the dynamics and evolution of black-hole accretion and outflows, test general…

We examine predictions for the quasar luminosity functions (QLF) and quasar clustering at high redshift (z > 4.75) using MassiveBlack, our new hydrodynamic cosmological simulation which includes a self-consistent model for black hole growth…

We analyze a sample of optical light curves for 100 quasars, 70 of which have black hole mass estimates. Our sample is the largest and broadest used yet for modeling quasar variability. The sources in our sample have z < 2.8 and 10^6 < M_BH…