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Shedding New Light on Weak Emission-line Quasars in the C iv–Hβ Parameter Space
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Shedding New Light on Weak Emission-line Quasars in the C iv–Hβ Parameter Space

Trung Ha, Dix Cooper, Brandon Matthews, Ohad Shemmer, Michael Brotherton, Adam Myers, Gordon Richards, Jaya Maithil, Scott Anderson, W Brandt, …
The Astrophysical journal, v 950(2), pp 97-108
20 Jun 2023
url
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/acd04dView
CC BY V4.0 Open

Abstract

Accretion Black holes Blue shift Correlation Deposition Emission analysis Emission lines Emissions Luminosity Parameters Quasars Red shift
Weak emission-line quasars (WLQs) are a subset of type 1 quasars that exhibit extremely weak Lyα + N vλ1240 and/or C ivλ1549 emission lines. We investigate the relationship between emission-line properties and accretion rate for a sample of 230 “ordinary” type 1 quasars and 18 WLQs at z < 0.5 and 1.5 < z < 3.5 that have rest-frame ultraviolet and optical spectral measurements. We apply a correction to the Hβ-based black hole mass (MBH) estimates of these quasars using the strength of the optical Fe ii emission. We confirm previous findings that WLQs’ MBH values are overestimated by up to an order of magnitude using the traditional broad-emission-line region size–luminosity relation. With this MBH correction, we find a significant correlation between Hβ-based Eddington luminosity ratios and a combination of the rest-frame C iv equivalent width and C iv blueshift with respect to the systemic redshift. This correlation holds for both ordinary quasars and WLQs, which suggests that the two-dimensional C iv parameter space can serve as an indicator of accretion rate in all type 1 quasars across a wide range of spectral properties.

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Astronomy & Astrophysics
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