Related papers: Quasars as tracers of cosmic flows
Observations of CO molecules in the millimetrer domain at high redshift (larger than 1), have provided interesting informations about star formation efficiency, and its evolution with redshift. Due to the difficulty of the detections,…
Quasars accreting matter at very high rates (known as extreme Population A [xA]) may provide a new class of distance indicators covering cosmic epochs from present day up to less than 1 Gyr from the Big Bang. We report on the developments…
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 the final results from our survey of luminous $z \sim $ 5.5 quasars. This is the first systematic quasar survey focusing on quasars at $z \sim$ 5.5, during the post-reionization epoch. It has been challenging to select quasars at…
Gravitationally lensed QSOs (GLQs) at redshift z = 1-2 play a key role in understanding the cosmic evolution of the innermost parts of active galaxies (black holes, accretion disks, coronas and internal jets), as well as the structure of…
Quasars with redshifts greater than 4 are rare, and can be used to probe the structure and evolution of the early universe. Here we report the discovery of six new quasars with $i$-band magnitudes brighter than 19.5 and redshifts between…
In the past years, the results obtained by the WISSH quasar project provided a novel general picture on the distinctive multi-band properties of hyper-luminous ($L_{bol}>10^{47}$ erg/s) quasars at high redshift (z$\sim$2-4), unveiling…
Two recent discoveries have made it possible for us to begin using high-z quasars as standard candles to construct a Hubble Diagram (HD) at z > 6. These are (1) the recognition from reverberation mapping that a relationship exists between…
We have been carrying out a successful observational programme targeted at finding the highly obscured quasars that are thought to be the main contributors to the hard X-ray background. Out of 56 sources so far studied with optical and…
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…
A relation between the variational slope, $s_F$ , and the mean absolute magnitude, $\langle M \rangle$, in the light curves of 58 spectroscopically confirmed quasars is measured with a dispersion of 0.15dex. Assuming it holds for quasars in…
The accretion of a cloud of hydrogen at the surface of a small, heavy star produces a high energy mostly dissipated by electromagnetic radiation. The combination of the absorption and the redshift of this radiation by hydrogen explains all…
Quasars represent a brief phase in the life-cycle of most massive galaxies, but the evolutionary connection between central black holes and their host galaxies remains unclear. While quasars are active and shining brighter than the…
The 100,000 spectra from the 2 degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) in the 100k Public Data Release represent the largest single compilation of galaxy spectra available. By virtue of its sheer size and the properties of the…
Over the last decade, quasar sample sizes have increased from several thousand to several hundred thousand, thanks mostly to SDSS imaging and spectroscopic surveys. LSST, the next-generation optical imaging survey, will provide hundreds of…
Large, homogeneous quasar samples are necessary tools for the study of QSO statistics, cosmological tests, large scale structure and AGN evolution. These samples must be complete within well defined flux limits at all redshifts. An…
Recently, it was suggested that large concentrations or groups of quasars may trace sites of enhanced matter density at medium and high redshifts analogous to how galaxy clusters trace them in nearby space. We have checked existing quasar…
Quasars signal a unique phase of galaxy evolution -- when massive spheroids are rapidly being assembled, forming stars and growing their central super-massive black holes. Measurements of the metal abundances around quasars provide unique…
If the unexpectedly high frequency of quasar pairs with very different component redshifts is due to the lensing of a population of background quasars by the foreground quasar, typical lens masses must be $\sim10^{12}M_{\sun}$ and the sum…
I review the observations of gravitationally lensed quasars. These systems are important because they allow us to probe the properties of the lensing galaxies at various scales, and they also allow insights into the structures of the…