Two more, bright, z > 6 quasars from VST ATLAS and WISE


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Recently, Carnall et al. discovered two bright high redshift quasars using the combination of the VST ATLAS and WISE surveys. The technique involved using the 3-D colour plane i-z:z-W1:W1-W2 with the WISE W1 (3.4 micron) and W2 (4.5 micron) bands taking the place of the usual NIR J band to help decrease stellar dwarf contamination. Here we report on our continued search for 5.7<z<6.4 quasars over an ~2x larger area of ~3577 sq. deg. of the Southern Hemisphere. We have found two further z>6 quasars, VST-ATLAS J158.6938-14.4211 at z=6.07 and J332.8017-32.1036 at z=6.32 with magnitudes of z_AB=19.4 and 19.7 mag respectively. J158.6938-14.4211 was confirmed by Keck LRIS observations and J332.8017-32.1036 was confirmed by ESO NTT EFOSC-2 observations. Here we present VLT X-shooter Visible and NIR spectra for the four ATLAS quasars. We have further independently rediscovered two z>5.7 quasars previously found by the VIKING/KiDS and PanSTARRS surveys. This means that in ATLAS we have now discovered a total of six quasars in our target 5.7<z<6.4 redshift range. Making approximate corrections for incompleteness, we find that our quasar space density agrees with the SDSS results of Jiang et al. at M_1450A~-27mag. Preliminary virial mass estimates based on the CIV and MIII emission lines give black hole masses in the range M_BH~1-6x10e9 M_solar for the four ATLAS quasars.

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