A Study of Outflows in Luminous Quasars at Redshift $sim0.4-0.8$


Abstract in English

We perform a systematic study of outflow in the narrow-line region (NLR) of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at $zsim0.4-0.8$ basing upon a large sample of $sim900$ quasars at $zsim 0.4-0.8$. The sample is extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by mainly requiring 1) the g-band magnitude is brighter than 19 magnitude; and 2) the [OIII]$lambda5007$ emission line has a signal-to-noise ration larger than 30. Profiles of multiple emission lines are modeled by a sum of several Gaussian functions. The spectral analysis allows us to identify 1) a prevalence of both [OIII]$lambda5007$ line blue asymmetry and bulk velocity blueshift of both [NeIII]$lambda3869$ and [NeV]$lambda3426$ lines, when the [ion{O}{2}]$lambda3727$ line is used as a reference. The velocity offset of [ion{O}{3}]$lambda5007$ line is, however, distributed around zero value, except for a few outliers. 2) not only the significant [OIII]$lambda5007$ line asymmetry, but also the large bulk velocity offsets of [NeIII]$lambda3869$ and [NeV]$lambda3426$ emission lines tend to occur in the objects with high $L/L_{mathrm{Edd}}$, which is considerably consistent with the conclusions based on local AGNs. With three $M_{mathrm{BH}}$ estimation methods, the significance level of the trend is found to be better than $2.9sigma$, $3.2sigma$ and $1.8sigma$ for [OIII], [NeIII] and [NeV], respectively. rm After excluding the role of radio jets, the revealed dependence of NLR gas outflow on $L/L_{mathrm{Edd}}$ allows us to argue that the pressure caused by the wind/radiation launched/emitted from central supermassive black hole is the most likely origin of the outflow in these distant quasars, which implies that the outflow in luminous AGNs up to $zsim1$ have the same origin.

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