The Magellanic Quasars Survey. III. Spectroscopic Confirmation of 758 AGNs Behind the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

The Magellanic Quasars Survey (MQS) has now increased the number of quasars known behind the Magellanic Clouds by almost an order of magnitude. All survey fields in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and 70% of those in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) have been observed. The targets were selected from the third phase of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE-III) based on their optical variability, mid-IR and/or X-ray properties. We spectroscopically confirmed 758 (565 LMC and 193 SMC) quasars behind the Clouds, of which 94% (527 LMC and 186 SMC) are newly identified. The MQS quasars have long-term (12 years and growing for OGLE), high-cadence light curves, enabling unprecedented variability studies of quasars. The MQS quasars also provide a dense reference grid for measuring both the internal and bulk proper motions of the Clouds, and 50 quasars are bright enough (I<18 mag) for absorption studies of the interstellar/galactic (ISM/IGM) medium of the Clouds.

32 pages that include 10 figures and 4 tables (full Tables 2 and 3 included in the source file); submitted to ApJ

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• Identification of AGN in the XMM-Newton X-ray survey of the SMC
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• Minimum Spanning Tree cluster analysis of the LMC region above 10 GeV: detection of the SNRs N 49B and N 63A
• The VMC Survey -- XLIX. Discovery of a population of quasars dominated by nuclear dust emission behind the Magellanic Clouds
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• Radio Continuum Sources behind the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Variability in Quasar Light Curves: using quasars as standard candles
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• Identification of blazar candidates behind Small and Large Magellanic Clouds
• The intrinsic reddening of the Magellanic Clouds as traced by background galaxies -- III. The Large Magellanic Cloud
• Discovery of a ~30-Year-Duration Post-Nova Pulsating Supersoft Source in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• DULAG: A DUal and Lensed AGN candidate catalog with GMP method
• A Geometric Probe of Cosmology: I. Gravitational Lensing Time Delays and Quasar Reverberation Mapping
• Probing the nature of AX J0043-737: Not an 87 ms pulsar in the SMC
• The orbital dynamics of the LMC and SMC about the Milky Way