Related papers: Characterizing Quasar CIV Emission-line Measuremen…
We present Chandra X-ray imaging and spectroscopy for 14 quasars in spatially resolved pairs, part of a complete sample of binary quasars with small transverse separations drawn from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (DR6) photometry. We find no…
Precise measurements of black hole masses are essential to understanding the coevolution of these sources and their host galaxies. We develop a novel approach for computing black hole virial masses using measurements of continuum…
We perform a spectral analysis of a sample of 11 medium redshift (1.5 < z < 2.2) quasars. Our sample all have optical spectra from the SDSS, infrared spectra from GNIRS and TSPEC, and X-ray spectra from XMM-Newton. We first analyse the…
Broad Absorption Lines indicate gas outflows with velocities from thousands km/s to about 0.2 the speed of light, which may be present in all quasars and may play a major role in the evolution of the host galaxy. The variability of…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool allowing one to probe the structure of quasars on sub-parsec scale. We report recent results, focusing on the broad absorption and emission line regions. In particular microlensing reveals the…
We report on a survey for narrow (FWHM < 600 km/s) CIV absorption lines in a sample of bright quasars at redshifts $1.8 \le z < 2.25$ in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our main goal is to understand the relationship of narrow CIV absorbers…
Various unification schemes interpret the complex phenomenology of quasars and luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) in terms of a simple picture involving a central black hole, an accretion disc and an associated outflow. Here, we continue…
We present preliminary results from a reverberation mapping program to measure the Broad Line Region size in high-redshift, high-luminosity quasars. The observations are carried out at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and at the Wise Observatory.…
Context: Quasar variability has proven to be a powerful tool to constrain the properties of their inner engine and the accretion process onto supermassive black holes. Correlations between UV/optical variability and physical properties have…
We present results from the largest systematic investigation of broad absorption line (BAL) acceleration to date. We use spectra of 140 quasars from three Sloan Digital Sky Survey programs to search for global velocity offsets in BALs over…
A variety of investigations have demonstrated commonalities between the Baldwin (1977) Effect, the blueshifting of CIV emission lines (e.g., Gaskell 1982; Richards et al. 2002), and the L_UV-L_X relationship (e.g., Avni & Tananbaum 1982;…
We use the anticorrelation between the equivalent width (EW) of the C\,\textsc{iv} 1549 {\AA} emission line and the continuum luminosity in the quasars rest frame (Baldwin effect) to measure their luminosity distance as well as estimate…
We have obtained H-band spectra of 32 luminous quasars at 2.0<z<2.5 with the Multiple Mirror Telescope. The sample contains 15 radio-loud quasars (RLQs) and 17 radio-quiet quasars (RQQs). We have measured emission line properties from the…
We have created a variety of composite quasar spectra using a homogeneous data set of over 2200 spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The quasar sample spans a redshift range of 0.044 <= z <= 4.789, and an absolute r' magnitude…
A method is proposed for measuring the size of the broad emission line region (BLR) in quasars using broadband photometric data. A feasibility study, based on numerical simulations, points to the advantages and pitfalls associated with this…
The kinematics and morphology of the broad emission line region (BELR) of quasars are the subject of significant debate. The two leading methods for constraining BELR properties are microlensing and reverberation mapping. Here we combine…
We present a reverberation mapping (RM) experiment that combines broad- and intermediate-band photometry; it is the first such attempt targeting a sample of 13 quasars at $0.2<z<0.9$. The quasars were selected to have strong H$\alpha$ or…
We obtained SDSS spectra for a set of 37 radio-quiet quasars (RQQSOs) that had been previously examined for rapid small scale optical variations, or microvariability. Their H-beta and Mg II emission lines were carefully fit to determine…
Repeat scans by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) of a 278 square degree stripe along the Celestial equator have yielded an average of over 10 observations each for nearly 8,000 spectroscopically confirmed quasars. Over 2500 of these…
Variability is a striking features of quasars, observed at all timescales wavelengths. Studying its properties and the correlations with the physical parameters (e.g. black hole mass and accretion rate) provides significant insights into…