Luminous eBOSS Quasars Missing from Visually Inspected SDSS Catalogs
Abstract
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) collaboration has provided many previous catalogs of quasar spectra that have been visually inspected to verify quasar classifications and redshifts. Recent versions of these catalogs have focused on manually classifying targets that were mostly related to quasar-specific programs. However, just as quasar targets can turn out to be galaxies and stars, programs aimed at galaxies and stars can accidentally target quasars. We report on our work to visually inspect spectra of bright quasars that were targeted as quasars by the SDSS-IV/eBOSS program but that have never previously appeared in SDSS catalogues of visually inspected quasars. We manually processed objects from, typically "ancillary," SDSS programs such as the CHANDRAV1 and WHITEDWARF_SDSS programs and provide classifications and redshifts for any quasars we recover. We compiled and visually inspected 2033 confirmed quasars that are particularly bright. As these objects are so bright, they are particularly useful for studies that require very high signal-to-noise observations or that focus on the most luminous quasars. In addition, these objects can now be correctly incorporated into eBOSS catalogs to study quasar clustering and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, and can be used as test cases to train and improveautomated spectral classification pipelines.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23324221H