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Description
Large spectroscopic surveys have discovered very peculiar and hitherto unknown types of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Such rare objects may hold clues to the accretion history of the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. The authors aim to create a sizeable sample of unusual quasars from the unprecedented spectroscopic database of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This table contains a catalog of 1005 quasars with unusual spectra in the redshift interval from 0.6 to 4.3. [HEASARC Note: the redshifts in this table actually range from 0.497 to 4.771]. The quasars were selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (Abazajian et al., 2009, ApJS, 182, 543) by means of Kohonen self-organising maps. The spectra are dominated by either broad absorption lines (42%), unusual red continua (27%), weak emission lines (18%), or conspicuously strong optical and/or UV iron emission (11%). This large sample provides a useful resource for both studying properties and relations of/between different types of unusual quasars and selecting particularly interesting objects, even though the compilation is not aimed at completeness in a quantifiable sense. The spectra are grouped into seven types. The catalogue contains the redshift, the absolute magnitude, the spectral type, the radio loudness parameter, a peculiarity index, and some comments on peculiar spectral features. This table was created by the HEASARC in May 2012 based on CDS table J/A+A/541/A77 file table3.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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