The Near and Mid-infrared photometric properties of known redshift $zgeq5$ Quasars


Abstract in English

We assemble a catalogue of 488 spectroscopically confirmed very high ($zgeq5.00$) redshift quasars and report their near- ($ZYJHK_{s}/K$) and mid- (WISE W1234) infrared properties. 97% of the VH$z$Q sample is detected in one or more NIR ($ZYJHK/K_{s}$) band, with lack of coverage rather than lack of depth being the reason for the non-detections. 389 (80%) of the very high redshift quasars are detected at 3.4$mu$m in the W1 band from the unWISE catalog and all of the $zgeq7$ quasars are detected in both unWISE W1 and W2. Using archival WFCAM/UKIRT and VIRCAM/VISTA data we check for photometric variability that might be expected from super-Eddington accretion. We find 28 of the quasars have sufficient NIR measurements and signal-to-noise ratio to look for variability. Weak variability was detected in multiple bands of SDSS J0959+0227, and very marginally in the $Y$-band of MMT J0215-0529. Only one quasar, SDSS J0349+0034, shows significant differences between WFCAM and VISTA magnitudes in one band. With supermassive black hole accretion likely to be redshift invariant up to very high-redshift, further monitoring of these sources is warranted. All the data, analysis codes and plots used and generated here can be found at: https://github.com/d80b2t/VHzQ}{tt github.com/d80b2t/VHzQ.

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