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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…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
Quadruply-imaged strongly lensed quasars (quads) are routinely used for measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe with time delays. It has recently been suggested that any quad lens is subject to a Malmquist-like bias that causes…
We report on Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of a sample of 13 quasars at z~4.7-5.4 mostly taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The present sample complements previous X-ray studies of z>4 quasars, in which the majority of…
Over the last few years, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has discovered several hundred quasars with redshift between 4.0 and 6.4. Including the effects of magnification bias, one expects a priori that an appreciable fraction of these…
The comparison of the orientations of the optical-polarization vectors of quasars that are separated by billions of light-years has led to the discovery that they are aligned instead of pointing in random directions as expected. This…
Since the beginning of the new millennium, more than 100 $z\sim 6$ quasars have been discovered through several surveys and followed-up with multi-wavelength observations. These data provided a large amount of information on the growth of…
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…
The rare close projection of two quasars on the sky provides the opportunity to study the host galaxy environment of a foreground quasar in absorption against the continuum emission of a background quasar. For over a decade the "Quasars…
The main purpose of this work is to improve the existing knowledge about the most powerful engines in the Universe - quasars. Although a lot is already known, we still have only a vague idea how these engines work exactly, why they behave…
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…
Chandra snapshot observations of the three most distant quasars then known, at redshifts 5.82, 5.99, and 6.28, gave signficant detections even in the short, 6 -- 8 ks, observations. The X-ray to optical luminosity ratios indicate that…
Recently discovered quasar pairs at high redshifts ($z\gtrsim$5) are likely precursors to supermassive black hole mergers, providing a promising window to high redshift quasar growth mechanisms. However, the large uncertainties on their…
It is commonly accepted that quasar redshifts have a cosmological character and that most of the quasars are at Gigaparsec distances. However, there are some cases where several quasars with completely different redshifts and a nearby…
We demonstrate that gravitationally lensed quasars are easily recognized using image subtraction methods as time variable sources that are spatially extended. For Galactic latitudes |b|>20 deg, lensed quasars dominate the population of…
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…
In the next 30 years, a new generation of space and ground-based telescopes will permit to obtain multi-frequency observations of faint sources and, for the first time in human history, to achieve a deep, almost synoptical monitoring of the…
A characteristic feature of quasars is the observed non-linear relationship between their monochromatic luminosities at rest-frame 2500 {\AA} and 2 keV. This relationship is evident across all redshifts and luminosities and, due to its…
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…
We perform a systematic search for long-term extreme variability quasars (EVQs) in the overlapping Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and 3-Year Dark Energy Survey (DES) imaging, which provide light curves spanning more than 15 years. We…