2006/12/07 by Adam D. Myers, Robert J. Brunner, R. C. Nichol +4 · 180 citations
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Dark matter #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Halo #Luminosity #OVV quasar #Physics #Quasar #Redshift #Remote Sensing in Agriculture #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/511519
published in The Astrophysical Journal 658(1), 85-98 (IOP Publishing) · 13 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables; uses amulateapj; accepted to ApJ
arxiv created 2006/12/07 · openalex publication_date 2007/03/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/08
Using ~300,000 photometrically classified quasars, by far the largest quasar sample ever used for such analyses, we study the redshift and luminosity evolution of quasar clustering on scales of ~50 h -1 kpc to ~20 h -1 Mpc from redshifts of ~ 0.75-2.28. We parameterize our clustering amplitudes using realistic dark matter models and find that a ΛCDM power spectrum provides a superb fit to our data with a redshift-averaged quasar bias of b = 2.41 ± 0.08 ( P <χ 2 = 0.847) for σ 8 = 0.9. This represents a better fit than the best-fit power-law model [ω = (0.0493 ± 0.0064) θ -0.928±0.055 ; P <χ 2 = 0.482]. We find b Q increases with redshift. This evolution is significant at >99.6% using our data set alone, increasing to >99.9999% if stellar contamination is not explicitly parameterized. We measure the quasar classification efficiency across our full sample as a = 95.6 ± %, a star-quasar separation comparable to the star-galaxy separation in many photometric studies of galaxy clustering. We derive the mean mass of the dark matter halos hosting quasars as M DMH = (5.2 ± 0.6) × 10 12 h -1 M ☉ . At ~ 1.9 we find a 1.5 σ deviation from luminosity-independent quasar clustering; this suggests that increasing our sample size by a factor of ~1.8 could begin to constrain any luminosity dependence in quasar bias at z ~ 2. Our results agree with recent studies of quasar environments at z < 0.4, which detected little luminosity dependence to quasar clustering on proper scales ≳50 h -1 kpc. At z < 1.6, our analysis suggests that b Q is constant with luminosity to within Δ b Q ~ 0.6, and that, for g < 21, angular quasar autocorrelation measurements are unlikely to have sufficient statistical power at z ≲ 1.6 to detect any luminosity dependence in quasars' clustering.