Related papers: Quasars and their host galaxies
The discovery of quasars few hundred megayears after the Big Bang represents a major challenge to our understanding of black holes and galaxy formation and evolution. Their luminosity is produced by extreme gas accretion onto black holes,…
We use the clustering of galaxies around distant active-galactic nuclei to derive an estimate of the relationship between galaxy and black hole mass that obtained during the ancient quasar epoch, at redshifts 2 <~ z <~ 3, when giant black…
Observations with the Wide-Field Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope are presented for a representative sample of 20 intrinsically luminous quasars with redshifts smaller than 0.30. These observations show that luminous quasars occur in…
Microquasars are compact objects (stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars) that mimic, on a smaller scale, many of the phenomena seen in quasars. Their discovery provided new insights into the physics of relativistic jets observed…
In the local universe, the masses of Super-Massive Black-Holes (SMBH) appear to correlate with physical properties of their hosts, including the mass of the dark-matter halos. At higher redshifts, we observe the growth of SMBHs indirectly…
The detection of starlight from the host galaxies of quasars during the reionization epoch ($z>6$) has been elusive, even with deep HST observations. The current highest redshift quasar host detected, at $z=4.5$, required the magnifying…
During five decades astronomers have been puzzled by the presence of strong absorption features including metal lines, observed in the optical and ultraviolet spectra of quasars, signalling in- and outflowing gas winds with relative…
We show that the mass function of black holes expected from the past quasar activity (both visible and obscured) is consistent with the number of dormant black holes found in the bulges of nearby galaxies. The joint formation of quasars and…
Luminous quasars at $z>4$ provide key insights into the early Universe. Their rarity necessitates wide-field multi-band surveys to efficiently separate them from the main astrophysical contaminants (i.e., ultracool dwarfs). To expand the…
We present near-infrared imaging obtained with ESO VLT/ISAAC of a sample of 16 low luminosity radio-quiet quasars at the epoch around the peak of the quasar activity (2 < z < 3), aimed at investigating their host galaxies. For 11 quasars,…
The discovery of high redshift quasars represents a challenge to the origin of supermassive black holes. Here, two evolutionary scenarios are considered. The first one concerns massive black holes in the local universe, which in a large…
Despite a general consensus in the astronomical community that all quasars are located at the distances implied by their redshifts, a number of observations still challenge this interpretation, possibly indicating that some subpopulation of…
We present discovery observations of a quasar in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey (CFHQS) at redshift z=6.44. We also use near-IR spectroscopy of nine CFHQS quasars at z~6 to determine black hole masses. These are compared with…
The uncharted territory of the high-redshift ($z\gtrsim3$) Universe holds the key to understand the evolution of quasars. In an attempt to identify the most extreme members of the quasar population, i.e., blazars, we have carried out a…
Observations from wide-field quasar surveys indicate that the quasar auto-correlation length increases dramatically from $z\approx2.5$ to $z\approx4$. This large clustering amplitude at $z\approx4$ has proven hard to interpret…
Using a homogenous sample of 38,208 quasars with a sky coverage of $4000 {\rm deg^2}$ drawn from the SDSS Data Release Five quasar catalog, we study the dependence of quasar clustering on luminosity, virial black hole mass, quasar color,…
We assess evolution in the black hole mass - stellar velocity dispersion relationship (M-sigma relationship) for quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 for the redshift range 0.1 < z < 1.2. We estimate the black hole mass…
The early growth of high-redshift quasars and their host galaxies raises critical questions about their cosmic evolution. We exploit the angular resolution and sensitivity of NIRCam to investigate the host galaxies of 31 quasars at…
We present K-band images of 31 radio quasars selected from the B3-VLA quasar sample. A new method has been developed to detect and restore the host galaxies of these quasars. We have detected the host galaxies of 16 of them. Using these…
The interaction between radio-jets and quasar host galaxies plays a paramount role in quasar/galaxy co-evolution. However, very little has been known so far about this interaction at very high-z. Here, we present new Atacama Large…