We present the Swift optical to X-ray spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 44 quasars at redshifts z approximate to 2 observed by Swift, part of a larger program to establish and characterize the optical through X-ray SEDs of moderate-redshift quasars. Here, we outline our analysis approach and present preliminary analysis and results for the first third of the full quasar sample. Not all quasars in the sample are detected in X-rays; all of the X-ray-detected objects so far are radio loud. As expected for radio-loud objects, they are X-ray bright relative to radioquiet quasars of comparable optical luminosities, with an average alpha(ox) = 1.39 +/- 0.03 (where alpha(ox) is the power-law slope connecting the monochromatic flux at 2500 angstrom and at 2 keV), and display hard X-ray spectra. We find integrated 3000 angstrom-25 keV accretion luminosities of between 0.7 x 10(46) erg s (1) and 5.2 x 10(47) erg s (1). Based on single-epoch spectroscopic virial black hole mass estimates, we find that these quasars are accreting at substantial Eddington fractions, 0.1 less than or similar to L/L-Edd less than or similar to 1.

We present the Data Release 12 Quasar catalog (DR12Q) from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. This catalog includes all SDSS-III /BOSS objects that were spectroscopically targeted as quasar candidates during the full survey and that are confirmed as quasars via visual inspection of the spectra, have luminosities Mi[z = 2] < -20.5 (in a Lambda CDM cosmology with H-0 = 70 km s (1) Mpc (1), Omega(M) = 0 : 3, and Omega(A) = 0.7), and either display at least one emission line with a full width at half maximum (FWHM) larger than 500 km s (1) or, if not, have interesting /complex absorption features. The catalog also includes previously known quasars (mostly from SDSS-I and II) that were reobserved by BOSS. The catalog contains 297 301 quasars (272 026 are new discoveries since the beginning of SDSSIII) detected over 9376 deg(2) with robust identification and redshift measured by a combination of principal component eigenspectra. The number of quasars with z > 2.15 (184 101, of which 167 742 are new discoveries) is about an order of magnitude greater than the number of z > 2 : 15 quasars known prior to BOSS. Redshifts and FWHMs are provided for the strongest emission lines (C iv, C III], Mg II). The catalog identifies 29 580 broad absorption line quasars and lists their characteristics. For each object, the catalog presents five-band (u, g, r, i, z) CCD-based photometry with typical accuracy of 0.03 mag together with some information on the optical morphology and the selection criteria. When available, the catalog also provides information on the optical variability of quasars using SDSS and Palomar Transient Factory multi-epoch photometry. The catalog also contains X-ray, ultraviolet, near-infrared, and radio emission properties of the quasars, when available, from other large-area surveys. The calibrated digital spectra, covering the wavelength region 3600-10 500 a at a spectral resolution in the range 1300 < R < 2500, can be retrieved from the SDSS Catalog Archive Server. We also provide a supplemental list of an additional 4841 quasars that have been identified serendipitously outside of the superset defined to derive the main quasar catalog.

We describe the execution and data reduction of the European Southern Observatory Large Programme "Quasars and their absorption lines: a legacy survey of the high-redshift Universe with VLT/X-shooter" (hereafter "XQ-100"). XQ-100 has produced and made publicly available a homogeneous and high-quality sample of echelle spectra of 100 quasars (QSOs) at redshifts z similar or equal to 3.5-4.5 observed with full spectral coverage from 315 to 2500 nm at a resolving power ranging from R similar to 4000 to 7000, depending on wavelength. The median signal-to-noise ratios are 33, 25 and 43, as measured at rest-frame wavelengths 1700, 3000 and 3600 angstrom, respectively. This paper provides future users of XQ-100 data with the basic statistics of the survey, along with details of target selection, data acquisition and data reduction. The paper accompanies the public release of all data products, including 100 reduced spectra. XQ-100 is the largest spectroscopic survey to date of high-redshift QSOs with simultaneous rest-frame UV/optical coverage, and as such enables a wide range of extragalactic research, from cosmology and galaxy evolution to AGN astrophysics.

Studies of the most luminous quasars at high redshift directly probe the evolution of the most massive black holes in the early universe and their connection to massive galaxy formation. However, extremely luminous quasars at high redshift are very rare objects. Only wide-area surveys have a chance to constrain their population. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has so far provided the most widely adopted measurements of the quasar luminosity function at z > 3. However, a careful re-examination of the SDSS quasar sample revealed that the SDSS quasar selection is in fact missing a significant fraction of z greater than or similar to 3 quasars at the brightest end. We identified the purely optical-color selection of SDSS, where quasars at these redshifts are strongly contaminated by late-type dwarfs, and the spectroscopic incompleteness of the SDSS footprint as the main reasons. Therefore, we designed the Extremely Luminous Quasar Survey (ELQS), based on a novel near-infrared JKW2 color cut using Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE) AllWISE and 2MASS all-sky photometry, to yield high completeness for very bright (m(i) < 18.0) quasars in the redshift range of 3.0 <= z <= 5.0. It effectively uses random forest machinelearning algorithms on SDSS and WISE photometry for quasar-star classification and photometric redshift estimation. The ELQS will spectroscopically follow-up similar to 230 new quasar candidates in an area of similar to 12,000 deg(2) in the SDSS footprint to obtain a well-defined and complete quasar sample for an accurate measurement of the brightend quasar luminosity function (QLF) at 3.0 <= z <= 5.0. In this paper, we present the quasar selection algorithm and the quasar candidate catalog.

The sub-population of quasars reddened by intrinsic or intervening clouds of dust are known to be underrepresented in optical quasar surveys. By defining a complete parent sample of the brightest and spatially unresolved quasars in the COSMOS field, we quantify to which extent this sub-population is fundamental to our understanding of the true population of quasars. By using the available multiwavelength data of various surveys in the COSMOS field, we built a parent sample of 33 quasars brighter than J = 20 mag, identified by reliable X-ray to radio wavelength selection techniques. Spectroscopic follow-up with the NOT/ALFOSC was carried out for four candidate quasars that had not been targeted previously to obtain a 100% redshift completeness of the sample. The population of high AV quasars (HAQs), a specific sub-population of quasars selected from optical/near-infrared photometry, some of which were shown to be missed in large optical surveys such as SDSS, is found to contribute 21%(+9)(-5) of the parent sample. The full population of bright spatially unresolved quasars represented by our parent sample consists of 39%(+9)(-8) reddened quasars defined by having A(V) > 0.1, and 21%(+9)(-5) of the sample having E(B-V) > 0.1 assuming the extinction curve of the Small Magellanic Cloud. We show that the HAQ selection works well for selecting reddened quasars, but some are missed because their optical spectra are too blue to pass the g - r color cut in the HAQ selection. This is either due to a low degree of dust reddening or anomalous spectra. We find that the fraction of quasars with contributing light from the host galaxy, causing observed extended spatial morphology, is most dominant at z less than or similar to 1. At higher redshifts the population of spatially unresolved quasars selected by our parent sample is found to be representative of the full population of bright active galactic nuclei at J < 20 mag. This work quantifies the bias against reddened quasars in studies that are based solely on optical surveys.

Quasars are galaxies hosting accreting supermassive black holes; due to their brightness, they are unique probes of the early universe. To date, only a few quasars have been reported at z > 6.5 (< 800 Myr after the big bang). In this work, we present six additional z greater than or similar to 6.5 quasars discovered using the Pan-STARRS1 survey. We use a sample of 15 z greater than or similar to 6.5 quasars to perform a homogeneous and comprehensive analysis of this highest-redshift quasar population. We report four main results: (1) the majority of z greater than or similar to 6.5 quasars show large blueshifts of the broad C IV lambda 1549 emission line compared to the systemic redshift of the quasars, with a median value similar to 3x higher than a quasar sample at z similar to 1; (2) we estimate the quasars' black hole masses (M-BH similar to (0.3-5) x. 10(9) M circle dot) via modeling of the Mg II lambda 2798 emission line and rest-frame UV continuum and find that quasars at high redshift accrete their material (with <(Lbol L-Edd)> = 0.39) at a rate comparable to a luminosity-matched sample at lower redshift, albeit with significant scatter (0.4 dex); (3) we recover no evolution of the Fe II/Mg II abundance ratio with cosmic time; and (4) we derive near-zone sizes and, together with measurements for z similar to 6 quasars from recent work, confirm a shallow evolution of the decreasing quasar near-zone sizes with redshift. Finally, we present new millimeter observations of the [C II] 158 mu m emission line and underlying dust continuum from NOEMA for four quasars and provide new accurate redshifts and [C II]/infrared luminosity estimates. The analysis presented here shows the large range of properties of the most distant quasars.

Luminous quasars at z > 5.6 can be studied in detail with the current generation of telescopes and provide us with unique information on the first gigayear of the universe. Thus far, these studies have been statistically limited by the number of quasars known at these redshifts. Such quasars are rare, and therefore, wide-field surveys are required to identify them, and multiwavelength data are required to separate them efficiently from their main contaminants, the far more numerous cool dwarfs. In this paper, we update and extend the selection for the z similar to 6 quasars presented in Banados et al. (2014) using the Pan- STARRS1 (PS1) survey. We present the PS1 distant quasar sample, which currently consists of 124 quasars in the redshift range 5.6 less than or similar to z less than or similar to 6.7 that satisfy our selection criteria. Of these quasars, 77 have been discovered with PS1, and 63 of them are newly identified in this paper. We present the composite spectra of the PS1 distant quasar sample. This sample spans a factor of similar to 20 in luminosity and shows a variety of emission line properties. The number of quasars at z > 5.6 presented in this work almost doubles the previously known quasars at these redshifts, marking a transition phase from studies of individual sources to statistical studies of the high-redshift quasar population, which was impossible with earlier, smaller samples.

We describe the first data release from the Spitzer-IRAC Equatorial Survey (SpIES); a large-area survey of similar to 115 deg(2) in the Equatorial SDSS Stripe 82 field using Spitzer during its "warm" mission phase. SpIES was designed to probe sufficient volume to perform measurements of quasar clustering and the luminosity function at z >= 3 to test various models for "feedback" from active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Additionally, the wide range of available multi-wavelength, multi-epoch ancillary data enables SpIES to identify both high-redshift (z >= 5) quasars as well as obscured quasars missed by optical surveys. SpIES achieves 5 sigma depths of 6.13 mu Jy (21.93 AB magnitude) and 5.75 mu Jy (22.0 AB magnitude) at 3.6 and 4.5 mu m, respectively-depths significantly fainter than the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We show that the SpIES survey recovers a much larger fraction of spectroscopically confirmed quasars (similar to 98%) in Stripe 82 than are recovered by WISE (similar to 55%). This depth is especially powerful at high-redshift (z >= 3.5), where SpIES recovers 94% of confirmed quasars, whereas WISE only recovers 25%. Here we define the SpIES survey parameters and describe the image processing, source extraction, and catalog production methods used to analyze the SpIES data. In addition to this survey paper, we release 234 images created by the SpIES team and three detection catalogs: a 3.6 mu m. only detection catalog containing similar to 6.1 million sources, a 4.5 mu m. only detection catalog containing similar to 6.5 million sources, and a dual-band detection catalog containing similar to 5.4 million sources.

To elucidate the intrinsic broadband infrared (IR) emission properties of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), we analyze the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 87 z less than or similar to 0.5 Palomar-Green (PG) quasars. While the Elvis AGN template with a moderate far-IR correction can reasonably match the SEDs of the AGN components in similar to 60% of the sample (and is superior to alternatives such as that by Assef), it fails on two quasar populations: (1) hot-dustdeficient (HDD) quasars that show very weak emission thoroughly from the near-IR to the far-IR, and (2) warm-dust- deficient (WDD) quasars that have similar hot dust emission as normal quasars but are relatively faint in the mid-and far-IR. After building composite AGN templates for these dust-deficient quasars, we successfully fit the 0.3-500 mu m SEDs of the PG sample with the appropriate AGN template, an infrared template of a star-forming galaxy, and a host galaxy stellar template. 20 HDD and 12 WDD quasars are identified from the SED decomposition, including seven ambiguous cases. Compared with normal quasars, the HDD quasars have AGNs with relatively low Eddington ratios and the fraction of WDD quasars increases with AGN luminosity. Moreover, both the HDD and WDD quasar populations show relatively stronger mid-IR silicate emission. Virtually identical SED properties are also found in some quasars from z = 0.5 to 6. We propose a conceptual model to demonstrate that the observed dust deficiency of quasars can result from a change of structures of the circumnuclear tori that can occur at any cosmic epoch.

The range of currently proposed active galactic nucleus (AGN) far-infrared templates results in uncertainties in retrieving host galaxy information from infrared observations and also undermines constraints on the outer part of the AGN torus. We discuss how to test and reconcile these templates. Physically, the fraction of the intrinsic AGN IR-processed luminosity compared with that from the central engine should be consistent with the dust-covering factor. In addition, besides reproducing the composite spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of quasars, a correct AGN IR template combined with an accurate library of star-forming galaxy templates should be able to reproduce the IR properties of the host galaxies, such as the luminosity-dependent SED shapes and aromatic feature strengths. We develop tests based on these expected behaviors and find that the shape of the AGN intrinsic far-IR emission drops off rapidly starting at similar to 20 mu m and can be matched by an Elvis et al.-like template with a. minor modification. Despite the variations in the near- to mid-IR bands, AGNs in quasars and Seyfert galaxies have remarkably similar intrinsic far-IR SEDs at lambda similar to 20-100 mu m, suggesting a similar emission character of the outermost region of the circumnuclear torus. The variations of the intrinsic AGN IR SEDs among the type-1 quasar population can be explained by the changing relative strengths of four major dust components with similar characteristic temperatures, and there is evidence for compact AGN-heated dusty structures at sub-kiloparsec scales in the far-IR.