Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasars Detected by Chandra
Short Name:
SDSSCXOQSO
Date:
07 Mar 2025
Publisher:
NASA/GSFC HEASARC
Description:
The authors have studied the spectral energy distributions and evolution of a large sample of optically selected quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) that were observed in 323 Chandra images analyzed by the Chandra Multiwavelength Project (ChaMP). Their highest-confidence matched sample (which this HEASARC table comprises) includes 1135 X-ray detected quasars in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 5.4, representing some 36 Msec of effective exposure. In their paper, the authors provide catalogs of QSO properties, and describe their novel method of calculating X-ray flux upper limits and effective sky coverage. Spectroscopic redshifts are available for about 1/3 of the detected sample; elsewhere, redshifts are estimated photometrically. The authors have detected 56 QSOs with redshift z > 3, substantially expanding the known sample. They find no evidence for evolution out to z ~ 5 for either the X-ray photon index Gamma or for the ratio of optical/UV to X-ray flux Alpha_ox. About 10% of detected QSOs show best-fit intrinsic absorbing columns greater than 10<sup>22</sup> cm<sup>-2</sup>, but the fraction might reach ~1/3 if most nondetections are absorbed. The authors confirm a significant correlation between Alpha_ox and optical luminosity, but it flattens or disappears for fainter (M_B >~ -23) active galactic nucleus (AGN) alone. They report significant hardening of Gamma both toward higher X-ray luminosity, and for relatively X-ray loud quasars. These trends may represent a relative increase in nonthermal X-ray emission, and their findings thereby strengthen analogies between Galactic black hole binaries and AGN. For uniformly selected subsamples of narrow-line Seyfert 1s and narrow absorption line QSOs, they find no evidence for unusual distributions of either Alpha_ox or Gamma. Much more information on the SDSS is available at the project's web site at <a href="http://www.sdss.org/">http://www.sdss.org/</a>. This table was created by the HEASARC in April 2009 based on the machine-readable version of Table 2 ('Properties of SDSS Quasars Detected by Chandra') which was obtained from the ApJ website. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
