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Five High-Redshift Quasars Discovered in Commissioning Imaging Data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey*

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Wei Zheng1,2, Zlatan I. Tsvetanov1,2, Donald P. Schneider3, Xiaohui Fan4, Robert H. Becker5, Marc Davis6, Richard L. White7, Michael A. Strauss4, John E. Anderson, Jr.4, James Annis8, Neta A. Bahcall4, A. J. Connolly9, István Csabai1,10, Arthur F. Davidsen1, Masataka Fukugita11,12, James E. Gunn4, Timothy M. Heckman1, G. S. Hennessy13, Željko Ivezić4, G. R. Knapp4, Robert H. Lupton4, Eric Peng1, Alexander S. Szalay1, Aniruddha R. Thakar1, Brian Yanny8 and Donald G. York14

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We report the discovery of five quasars with redshifts of 4.67–5.27 and z'-band magnitudes of 19.5–20.7 (MB ~ -27). All were originally selected as distant quasar candidates in optical/near-infrared photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and most were confirmed as probable high-redshift quasars by supplementing the SDSS data with J and K measurements. The quasars possess strong, broad Lyα emission lines, with the characteristic sharp cutoff on the blue side produced by Lyα forest absorption. Three quasars contain strong, broad absorption features, and one of them exhibits very strong N V emission. The amount of absorption produced by the Lyα forest increases toward higher redshift, and that in the z = 5.27 object (DA ≈ 0.7) is consistent with a smooth extrapolation of the absorption seen in lower redshift quasars. The high luminosity of these objects relative to most other known objects at z gtrsim 5 makes them potentially valuable as probes of early quasar properties and of the intervening intergalactic medium.


Footnote
*  Based on observations obtained with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and with the Apache Point Observatory 3.5 m telescope, which is owned and operated by the Astrophysical Research Consortium, with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München, and George-August-Universität Göttingen, and at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the University of California, the California Institute of Technology, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.
Keywords

quasars: general; surveys


Dates

Issue 4 (2000 October)

Received 2000 May 10, accepted for publication 2000 June 13



  1. Five High-Redshift Quasars Discovered in Commissioning Imaging Data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

    Wei Zheng et al. 2000 The Astronomical Journal 120 1607

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