Related papers: Highly Accreting Quasars: Sample Definition and Po…
Quasars accreting at very high rates are believed to be prime movers of galactic evolution because of their high radiative and mechanical output. The study presented in this paper investigates a sample of six highly accreting quasars at…
Recently some pessimism has been expressed about our lack of progress in understanding quasars over the 50+ year since their discovery. It is worthwhile to look back at some of the progress that has been made - but still lies under the…
The redshift of all cosmological sources drifts by a systematic velocity of order a few m/s over a century due to the deceleration of the Universe. The specific functional dependence of the predicted velocity shift on the source redshift…
Quasars accreting matter at very high rates (known as extreme Population A [xA] or super-Eddington accreting massive black holes) provide a new class of distance indicators covering cosmic epochs from the present-day Universe up to less…
We present Chandra observations of 63 sources from the Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph$-$Distant Quasar Survey (GNIRS-DQS) of which 54 were targeted by snapshot observations in Cycle 24. A total of 55 sources are clearly detected in at…
The concordance (LambdaCDM) model reproduces the main current cosmological observations assuming the validity of general relativity at all scales and epochs, the presence of cold dark matter, and of a cosmological constant, equivalent to a…
A comparison between the line of sight power spectrum of absorption in the Lyman-alpha forest and the cross power spectrum between the absorption in neighboring lines of sight offers an evolution-free means to constrain the cosmological…
We present our first results of the survey for high redshift quasars at $5 \lesssim {\rm z} \lesssim 5.7$. The search for quasars in this redshift range has been known to be challenging due to limitations of filter sets used in previous…
The cosmic curvature ($\Omega_k$) is a fundamental parameter for cosmology. In this paper, we propose an improved model-independent method to constrain the cosmic curvature, which is geometrically related to the Hubble parameter $H(z)$ and…
We have compiled a catalog of 903 candidates for type 1 quasars at redshifts 3<z<5.5 selected among the X-ray sources of the serendipitous XMM-Newton survey presented in the 3XMM-DR4 catalog (the median X-ray flux is 5x10^{-15} erg/s/cm^2…
Although the $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter model is the most accredited cosmological model, information at high redshifts ($z$) between type Ia supernovae ($z=2.26$) and the Cosmic Microwave Background ($z=1100$) is crucial to validate this…
The non-linear relation between the X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) luminosity in quasars has been used to derive quasar distances and to build a Hubble diagram at redshifts up to $z\sim$ 7. This cosmological application is based on the…
We present preliminary results from a pencil-beam spectroscopic survey of low-luminosity quasars at z ~ 2.2-2.5. Our goal is to compare these sources with low redshift analogues of similar luminosity. High s/n and moderate resolution…
A number of deep, wide-field, near-infrared surveys employing new infrared cameras on 4m-class telescopes are about to commence. These surveys have the potential to determine the fraction of luminous dust-obscured quasars that may have…
We use a strong lensing inversion in the cluster of galaxies AC 114 to derive constraints on the cosmological parameters Omega_M0 and Omega_Lambda. If it is possible to measure spectroscopically the redshifts of many multiple images then…
We present a sample of 8498 quasars with both SDSS $ugriz$ optical and UKIDSS $YJHK$ near-IR photometric data. With this sample, we obtain the median colour-z relations based on 7400 quasars with magnitude uncertainties less than 0.1mag in…
General relativity reproduces main current cosmological observations, assuming the validity of cosmic distance duality relation (CDDR) at all scales and epochs. However, CDDR is poorly tested in the redshift interval between the farthest…
We present spectroscopic measurements for 226 sources from the Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph - Distant Quasar Survey (GNIRS-DQS). Being the largest uniform, homogeneous survey of its kind, it represents a flux-limited sample ($m_{i}$…
The X-ray luminosity function of distant (3<z<5.1) unabsorbed quasars has been measured. A sample of distant high-luminosity quasars ($10^{45} \leq L_{{\rm X},2-10} < 7.5 \times 10^{45}$ erg/s in the 2--10 keV energy band) from the catalog…
In this work we connect some measurable properties of the CIV1549 emission line with the quasar accretion rates (Eddington ratios). A tight correlation is found for a sample of more than a hundred nearby objects, suggesting a possible…