ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Investigations of He II Ly-alpha (304 A rest) absorption toward a half-dozen quasars at z~3-4 have demonstrated the great potential of helium studies of the IGM, but the current critically small sample size of clean sightlines for the He II Gunn-Peterson test limits confidence in cosmological inferences, and a larger sample is required. Although the unobscured quasar sightlines to high redshift are extremely rare, SDSS DR6 provides thousands of z>2.8 quasars. We have cross-correlated these SDSS quasars with GALEX GR2/GR3 to establish a catalog of 200 higher-confidence (~70% secure) cases of quasars at z=2.8-5.1 potentially having surviving far-UV (restframe) flux. We also catalog another 112 likely far-UV-bright quasars from GALEX cross-correlation with other (non-SDSS) quasar compilations. Reconnaissance UV prism observations with HST of 24 of our SDSS/GALEX candidates confirm 12 as detected in the far-UV, with at least 9 having flux extending to very near the He II break; with refinements our success rate is even higher. Our SDSS/GALEX selection approach is thereby confirmed to be an order of magnitude more efficient than previous He II quasar searches, more than doubles the number of spectroscopically confirmed clean sightlines to high redshift, and provides a resource list of hundreds of high-confidence sightlines for upcoming He II and other far-UV studies from HST. Our reconnaissance HST prism spectra suggest some far-UV diversity, confirming the need to obtain a large sample of independent quasar sightlines across a broad redshift range to assess such issues as the epoch(s) of helium reionization, while averaging over individual-object pathology and/or cosmic variance.
Absorption along quasar sightlines remains among the most sensitive direct measures of HeII reionization in much of the intergalactic medium (IGM). Until recently, fewer than a half-dozen unobscured quasar sightlines suitable for the HeII Gunn-Peters
The distribution of neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) is currently explored at low-z by means of UV spectroscopy of quasars. We propose an alternative approach based on UV colours of quasars as observed from GALEX surveys. We built a
We present an analysis of the broadband UV/optical properties of z<3.4 quasars matched in the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) General Data Release 1 (GR1) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 3 (SDSS DR3). Of the 6371 DR3 quasars covered b
We search for ultra-luminous QSOs at high redshift using photometry from the SkyMapper Southern Survey DR3, in combination with 2MASS, VHS DR6, VIKING DR5, AllWISE, and CatWISE2020, as well as parallaxes and proper motions from Gaia DR2 and eDR3. We
We discuss the UV, optical, and IR properties of the SDSS sources detected by GALEX as part of its All-sky Imaging Survey Early Release Observations. Virtually all of the GALEX sources in the overlap region are detected by SDSS. GALEX sources represe