Related papers: Highly Accreting Quasars: Sample Definition and Po…
The evolution of luminous QSOs is linked to the evolution of massive galaxies. We know this because the relic black-holes found locally have masses dependent on the properties of the host galaxy's bulge. An important way to explore this…
We present results of a program of high signal-to-noise spectroscopy for 44 QSOs at redshifts > 4 using the MMT and Keck observatories. The quasar spectra cover 1100 -- 1700 A in the rest frame for sources spanning a luminosity range of…
Inspired by a new compilation of strong lensing systems, which consist of 204 points in the redshift range $0.0625< z_{l} < 0.958$ for the lens and $0.196< z_{s} < 3.595$ for the source, we constrain three models that generate a late cosmic…
Spectra of quasars at high redshift with high resolution and high signal-to-noise allow in favorable circumstances detection of absorption by deuterium and ultimately measurement of its primordial abundance. Ultraviolet spectra of high…
State-of-the-art techniques to identify H\alpha emission line sources in narrow-band photometric surveys consist of searching for H\alpha excess with reference to nearby objects in the sky (position-based selection). However, while this…
We develop a new method for estimating and removing the spectrum of the sky from deep spectroscopic observations; our method does not rely on simultaneous measurement of the sky spectrum with the object spectrum. The technique is based on…
One of the big challenges in exoplanet science is to determine the atmospheric makeup of extrasolar planets, and to find biosignatures that hint at the existence of biochemical processes on another world. The biomarkers we are trying to…
Super-Eddington accreting massive black holes (SEAMBHs) reach saturated luminosities above a certain accretion rate due to photon trapping and advection in slim accretion disks. We show that these SEAMBHs could provide a new tool for…
We present new limits on cosmological parameters from the statistics of gravitational lensing, based on the recently revised knowledge of the luminosity function and internal dynamics of E/S0 galaxies that are essential in lensing…
In the two parts of this contribution we describe two related XMM-Newton programs. The first part summarizes our study of the X-ray spectral properties and variability of z>4 quasars (Shemmer et al. 2005). The second part presents…
We present a method to analyse arrival directions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) using a classifier defined by a deep convolutional neural network trained on a HEALPix grid. To illustrate a high effectiveness of the method, we…
A description is given of the method used to extract quasar host-galaxy parameters from the deep Hubble Space Telescope quasar images presented by McLure et al. (1999) and Dunlop et al. (2000). We then give the results of extensive testing…
We present an analysis of quasar variability from data collected during a photometric monitoring of 50 objects carried out at CNPq/Laboratorio Nacional de Astrofisica, Brazil, between March 1993 and July 1996. A distinctive feature of this…
Strong lensing has developed into an important astrophysical tool for probing both cosmology and galaxies (their structure, formation, and evolution). Using the gravitational lensing theory and cluster mass distribution model, we try to…
This paper advances a general proposal for testing non-standard cosmological models by means of observational relations of cosmological point sources in some specific waveband, and their use in the context of the data provided by the galaxy…
We describe a method from which cosmology may be constrained from the 2QZ Survey. By comparing clustering properties parallel and perpendicular to the line of sight and by modeling the effects of redshift space distortions, we are able to…
Understanding the faint end of quasar luminosity function at a high redshift is important since the number density of faint quasars is a critical element in constraining ultraviolet (UV) photon budgets for ionizing the intergalactic medium…
We use six different cosmological models to study the recently-released compilation of X-ray and UV flux measurements of 2038 quasars (QSOs) which span the redshift range $0.009 \leq z \leq 7.5413$. We find, for the full QSO data set, that…
We present a catalog of 1,172,157 quasar candidates selected from the photometric imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The objects are all point sources to a limiting magnitude of i=21.3 from 8417 sq. deg. of imaging from…
Although absorbed quasars are extremely important for our understanding of the energetics of the Universe, the main physical parameters of their central engines are still poorly known. In this work we present and study a complete sample of…