Dust Obscured Quasars: A Missing Link in Quasar Evolution

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

A host of observational evidence over several decades of research has suggested a formation and evolutionary link between the growth of supermassive black holes, quasar activity and the build-up of the stellar populations in their host galaxies. Such evolutionary scenarios have been invoked to explain the presence of buried AGN seen in ultraluminous infrared galaxies, a high fraction of which also show evidence of merging and interaction. However, the morphologies of luminous, blue quasars show no signs of interaction. Their hosts are mostly undistrubed elliptical galaxies. These seemingly conflicting observations suggest a missing link in the evolutionary path where the dust that completely buried the ULIRG is being cleared, eventually to reveal an unobscured, luminous quasar. This missing link may be a population of highly reddened, but not completely obscured quasars.
We have constructed asample of dust obscured quasars using FIRST and 2MASS. We find that for K < 14.0, red quasars make up between between 25% and 60% of the underlying quasar population. Here we present the continuation of this work to fainter infrared magnitudes, as well as a new approach for finding red quasars using 2MASS matches to the CRATES flat-spectrum radio catalog.

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