The Near and Mid-infrared photometric properties of known redshift $z\geq5$ Quasars

17 Jun 2019  ·  Nicholas P. Ross, Nicholas J. G. Cross ·

We assemble a catalogue of 463 spectroscopically confirmed very high ($z\geq5.00$) 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. 362 (78\%) 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 $z\geq7$ 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 32 of the quasars have sufficient NIR measurements and signal-to-noise 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. Two other quasars, SDSS J0349+0034 and SDSS J2220-0101 had significant differences between their 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: \href{https://github.com/d80b2t/VHzQ}{\tt github.com/d80b2t/VHzQ}.

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Astrophysics of Galaxies