Description
The presence of dust in quasar absorbers, such as damped Ly{alpha} (DLA) systems, may cause the background QSO to appear reddened. We investigate the extent of this potential reddening by comparing the optical-to-infrared colors of QSOs with and without intervening absorbers. Our QSO sample is based on the Complete Optical and Radio Absorption Line System (CORALS) survey of Ellison and coworkers. The CORALS data set consists of 66 radio-selected QSOs at z_em_>=2.2 with complete optical identifications. We have obtained near-simultaneous B- and K-band magnitudes for a subset of the CORALS sample and supplemented our observations with further measurements published in the literature. In total, we have B-K colors for 42 of the 66 QSOs, of which 14 have intervening DLA systems. To account for redshift-related color changes, the B-K colors are normalized using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey QSO composite.
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