The Extremely Luminous Quasar Survey in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Footprint. III. The South Galactic Cap Sample and the Quasar Luminosity Function at Cosmic Noon
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Final Published version
Author
Schindler, Jan-TorgeFan, Xiaohui
McGreer, Ian D.
Yang, Jinyi
Wang, Feige
Green, Richard
Fynbo, Johan P. U.
Krogager, Jens-Kristian
Green, Elisabeth M.
Huang, Yun-Hsin
Kadowaki, Jennifer
Patej, Anna
Wu, Ya-Lin
Yue, Minghao
Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Steward ObservIssue Date
2019-02-01
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IOP PUBLISHING LTDCitation
Jan-Torge Schindler et al 2019 ApJ 871 258Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNALRights
© 2019. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
We have designed the Extremely Luminous Quasar Survey (ELQS) to provide a highly complete census of unobscured UV-bright quasars during the cosmic noon, z - 2.8-5.0. Here we report the discovery of 70 new quasars in the ELQS South Galactic Cap (ELQS-S) quasar sample, doubling the number of known extremely luminous quasars in 4237.3 deg(2) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint. These observations conclude the ELQS and we present the properties of the full ELQS quasar catalog, containing 407 quasars over 11,838.5 deg(2). Our novel ELQS quasar selection strategy resulted in unprecedented completeness at the bright end and allowed us to discover 109 new quasars in total. This marks an increase of similar to 36% (109/298) in the known population at these redshifts and magnitudes, while we further are able to retain a selection efficiency of similar to 80%. On the basis of 166 quasars from the full ELQS quasar catalog, which adhere to the uniform criteria of the Two Micron All Sky Survey point source catalog, we measure the bright-end quasar luminosity function (QLF) and extend it one magnitude brighter than previous studies. Assuming a single power law with exponential density evolution for the functional form of the QLF, we retrieve the best-fit parameters from a maximum likelihood analysis. We find a steep brightend slope of beta approximate to -4.1, and we can constrain the bright-end slope to beta <= -3.4 with 99% confidence. The density is well modeled by the exponential redshift evolution, resulting in a moderate decrease with redshift (gamma approximate to -0.4).ISSN
1538-4357Version
Final published versionSponsors
US NSF [AST-1515115]; NASA ADAP [NNX17AF28G]; Danish Council for Independent Research (EU-FP7 under the Marie-Curie grant) [600207, DFF-MOBILEX-5051-00115]; DNRF; Heising-Simons FoundationAdditional Links
http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/871/i=2/a=258?key=crossref.b4fd2aac995a731fd69de1287e9d3fe1ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3847/1538-4357/aaf86c