The SDSS-XDQSO quasar targeting catalog

Mathematics – Probability

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We present the SDSS-XDQSO quasar targeting catalog for efficient flux-based quasar target selection down to the faint limit of the SDSS catalog, even at medium redshifts (2.5 < z < 3). We build models of the distributions of stars and quasars in flux space down to the flux limit by applying the extreme-deconvolution method (XD) to estimate the underlying density. We properly convolve this density with the flux uncertainties when evaluating the probability that an object is a quasar. This results in a targeting algorithm that is more principled, more efficient, and faster than other similar methods. We apply the algorithm to derive low- (z < 2.2), medium- (2.2 <= z 3.5) quasar probabilities for all 160,904,060 point-sources with dereddened i-and magnitude between 17.75 and 22.45 mag in SDSS Data Release 8. The catalog can be used to define a uniformly selected and efficient low- or medium-redshift quasar survey, such as that needed for the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey project. We show that the XDQSO technique performs as well as the current best photometric quasar selection technique at low redshift, and out-performs all other flux-based methods for selecting the medium-redshift quasars of our primary interest.
Research supported by NASA (grant NNX08AJ48G) and the NSF (grant AST-0908357).

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