A Systematic Meta-Survey of High Redshift Quasars Probing their Environments and Evolution
Abstract
We have constructed a meta-survey of 298 quasars in the window from 7 to 17.5 hours in right ascension and 0 to 65 degrees in declination. These quasars span three decades of total power and redshifts from 0.158 to 5.284. All sources had a flux density of greater than 70 mJy at 1.4 GHz. At redshifts z > 2.5 our sample is complete. It is also complete for z < 1 and P Tot1:4 > 1027.55 W/Hz. Our quasar sample is built from archival Very Large Array (VLA) observations, as well as three observations in 2007 and 2008.
This sample represents one of the most complete meta-surveys to date of the high redshift universe. In the 1980's, two competing groups (Ne, Gower and Hutchings, and Barthel, Miley, and Lonsdale) investigated the high redshift universe, seeking to investigate the dependence of largest linear size (LLS) and bending angles on redshift, core power, and extended power. Using our sample we test the differing results of these groups and build our own model of source evolution with redshift and power. We also seek a relationship between bending angles and core dominance, modeling this dependence on the thoughts of Orr & Browne showing that projected bending angles grow as the angle to the line of sight approaches the intrinsic bending angle of the quasar. We will also present an additional component of our high redshift quasar observations seeking arcsecond scale jets to be observed with the space based Chandra x-ray telescope. These observations will be used to investigate the nature of x-ray emission from the knots of kiloparsec jets in the high redshift universe.- Publication:
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Ph.D. Thesis
- Pub Date:
- 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011PhDT.........4G
- Keywords:
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- Agn;
- High redshift;
- Quasars;
- Meta-surveys;
- Universe