High-Redshift Quasars Found in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Commissioning Data. II. The Spring Equatorial Stripe

Abstract

This is the second paper in a series aimed at finding high-redshift quasars from five-color (u'g'r'i'z') imaging data taken along the Celestial Equator by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) during its commissioning phase. In this paper, we present 22 high-redshift quasars (z>3.6) discovered from ~250 deg^2 of data in the spring Equatorial Stripe, plus photometry for two previously known high-redshift quasars in the same region of sky. Our success rate of identifying high-redshift quasars is 68%. Five of the newly discovered quasars have redshifts higher than 4.6 (z=4.62, 4.69, 4.70, 4.92 and 5.03). All the quasars have i* < 20.2 with absolute magnitude -28.8 < M_B < -26.1 (h=0.5, q_0=0.5). Several of the quasars show unusual emission and absorption features in their spectra, including an object at z=4.62 without detectable emission lines, and a Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasar at z=4.92.

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Affiliated Institutions

• University of Chicago US
• Pennsylvania State University US
• California Institute of Technology US
• Eötvös Loránd University HU
• Princeton University US
• United States Naval Observatory US
• University of Michigan US
• Tokyo University of Science JP
• University of Washington US
• Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics DE
• Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory US
• Johns Hopkins University US
• Institute for Advanced Study US
• The University of Tokyo JP

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