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A Novel Test of Quasar Orientation
Journal article   Open access

A Novel Test of Quasar Orientation

Gordon T. Richards, Richard M. Plotkin, Paul C. Hewett, Amy L. Rankine, Angelica B. Rivera, Yue Shen and Ohad Shemmer
Astrophysical journal. Letters, v 914(1), pL14
01 Jun 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac0256
url
http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02633View
SubmittedOpen Access (License Unspecified),  Open
url
https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac0256View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Astronomy & Astrophysics Physical Sciences Science & Technology
The orientation of the disk of material accreting onto supermassive black holes that power quasars is one of most important quantities that are needed to understand quasars-both individually and in the ensemble average. We present a hypothesis for determining comparatively edge-on orientation in a subset of quasars (both radio loud and radio quiet). If confirmed, this orientation indicator could be applicable to individual quasars without reference to radio or X-ray data and could identify some 10%-20% of quasars as being more edge-on than average, based only on moderate resolution and signal-to-noise spectroscopy covering the C iv lambda 1549 angstrom emission feature. We present a test of said hypothesis using X-ray observations and identify additional data that are needed to confirm this hypothesis and calibrate the metric.

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4 citations in Web of Science
3 citations in Scopus

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Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Astronomy & Astrophysics
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