Bibcode
Song, H.; Park, Changbom; Lietzen, H.; Einasto, Maret
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 827, Issue 2, article id. 104, 11 pp. (2016).
Advertised on:
8
2016
Journal
Citations
11
Refereed citations
11
Description
We study the dependence of the number density and properties of quasars
on the background galaxy density using the currently largest
spectroscopic data sets of quasars and galaxies. We construct a galaxy
number density field smoothed over the variable smoothing scale of
between approximately 10 and 20 h ‑1 Mpc over the
redshift range 0.46 < z < 0.59 using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS) Data Release 12 (DR12) Constant MASS galaxies. The quasar sample
is prepared from the SDSS-I/II DR7. We examine the correlation of
incidence of quasars with the large-scale background density and the
dependence of quasar properties such as bolometric luminosity, black
hole mass, and Eddington ratio on the large-scale density. We find a
monotonic correlation between the quasar number density and large-scale
galaxy number density, which is fitted well with a power-law relation,
{n}Q\propto {ρ }G0.618. We detect
weak dependences of quasar properties on the large-scale density such as
a positive correlation between black hole mass and density, and a
negative correlation between luminosity and density. We discuss the
possibility of using quasars as a tracer of large-scale structures at
high redshifts, which may be useful for studies of the growth of
structures in the high-redshift universe.