Related papers: Highly Accreting Quasars: Sample Definition and Po…
Quasars are the most luminous sources in the Universe. They are currently observed out to redshift z ~ 7 when the Universe was less than one tenth of its present age. Since their discovery 50 years ago astronomers have dreamed of using them…
Highly accreting quasars are characterized by distinguishing properties in the 4D eigenvector 1 parameter space that make them easily recognizable over a broad range range of redshift and luminosity. The 4D eigenvector 1 approach allows us…
Last year (2013) was more or less the 50th anniversary of the discovery of quasars. It is an interesting time to review what we know (and don't know) about them both empirically and theoretically. These compact sources involving line…
Quasars accreting matter at very high rates (known as extreme Population A [xA] quasars, possibly associated with super-Eddington accreting massive black holes) may provide a new class of distance indicators covering cosmic epochs from…
Context:Quasars radiating at extreme Eddington ratios (xA) are likely a prime mover of galactic evolution and have been hailed as potential distance indicators. Their properties are still scarcely known. Aims:We test the effectiveness of…
We use 62185 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 sample to explore the relationship between black hole mass and luminosity. Black hole masses were estimated based on the widths of their H{\beta}, MgII and CIV lines and…
We present a new method to test the cosmological model, based on the non-linear relation between ultraviolet and X-ray luminosity of quasars. We built a data set of ~1,138 quasars by merging several literature samples with X-ray…
The cosmic curvature, a fundamental parameter for cosmology could hold deep clues to inflation and cosmic origins. We propose an improved model-independent method to constrain the cosmic curvature by combining the constructed Hubble diagram…
Currently, the $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter model, which relies on the existence of cold dark matter and a cosmological constant $\Lambda$, best describes the Universe. However, we lack information in the high-redshift ($z$) region between…
We present a new catalogue of ~2,400 optically selected quasars with spectroscopic redshifts and X-ray observations from either Chandra or XMM-Newton. The sample can be used to investigate the non-linear relation between the UV and X-ray…
In this paper, we present a model-independent approach to calibrate the largest quasar sample. Calibrating quasar samples is essentially constraining the parameters of the linear relation between the $\log$ of the ultraviolet (UV) and X-ray…
In this paper, based on a 2.29 GHz VLBI all-sky survey of 613 milliarcsecond ultra-compact radio sources with $0.0035<z<3.787$, we describe a method of identifying the sub-sample which can serve as individual standard rulers in cosmology.…
The most highly accreting quasars (xA) are of special interest in studies of the physics of AGNs and host galaxy evolution. Quasars accreting at high rates (L/LEdd $\sim$ 1) hold promise for use as 'standard candles': distance indicators…
This study is focused on the observational measurement of the viewing angle of individual quasars by modeling the broadband quasar spectrum ranging from the infra-red (IR) to the soft X-ray band. Sources are selected from various published…
The relation between the central mass and quasar luminosity (M_BH \propto L^{\alpha}FHWM^2) links a given Eddington ratio with a value of H_0, within a cosmology with fixed (\Omega_m,\Omega_{\Lambda}). We point out that because the relation…
Light rays from a multiply imaged quasar usually sample different path lengths across the deflector. Extinction in the lensing galaxy may thus lead to a differential obscuration and reddening between the observed macro-lensed QSO images.…
Accretion processes in quasars and active galactic nuclei are still poorly understood, especially as far as the connection between observed spectral properties and physical parameters is concerned. Quasars show an additional degree of…
We present the results of our recent Hubble Space Telescope imaging study, in which we have successfully deconvolved host and nuclear flux for the some of the most luminous quasars in the Universe. Host morphologies have been recovered for…
By comparing the results from numerical microlensing simulations to the observed long-term variability of quasars, strong upper limits on the cosmological density of compact objects in the 0.0001-1 solar mass range may in principle be…
In this paper, we use quasars calibrated from type Ia supernova (SN Ia) to constrain cosmological models. We consider three different X-ray luminosity ($L_{X}$) - ultraviolet luminosity ($L_{UV}$) relations of quasars, i.e., the standard…