Buried, But Alive: A Search for the Reddest Quasars

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The existence of a large population of heavily obscured quasars has been suggested on the basis of radio source infrared colors, and is required in popular models to explain the cosmic X-ray background. We have begun a search for this population by matching our FIRST 20cm radio sky survey with the available 2MASS catalog. We then select objects that are absent on the POSS I or are stellar and have extreme colors (R-K>5). More than fifty such objects have been found and pursued with optical and infrared photometry and spectroscopy at the MDM and Keck Observatories. While we have found a small number of high redshift (z>4) objects, most of the candidates are either intermediate redshift galaxies of heavily reddened quasars. One of the quasars is strongly lensed and others show broad absorption lines. We present the redshift distribution and luminosity function for these objects, and compare their optical-IR color distribution with those of radio and optically selected quasar samples. We also derive an estimate for the space density of bright, highly reddened quasars and compare our results with previous work on radio-loud AGN and the emerging population of Type II Quasars found in recent hard X-ray surveys. The FIRST survey and our subsequent followup work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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