The Quasar Candidates Catalogs of DESI Legacy Imaging Survey Data Release 9

Abstract

Quasars can be used to measure baryon acoustic oscillations at high redshift, which are considered as direct tracers of the most distant large-scale structures in the Universe. It is fundamental to select quasars from observations before implementing the above research. This work focuses on creating a catalog of quasar candidates based on photometric data to provide primary priors for further object classification with spectroscopic data in the future, such as The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Survey. We adopt a machine learning algorithm (Random Forest, RF) for quasar identification. The training set includes $651,073$ positives and $1,227,172$ negatives, in which the photometric information are from DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (DESI-LIS) \& Wide-field Infrared Survey Explore (WISE), and the labels are from a database of spectroscopically confirmed quasars based on Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Set of Identifications \& Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data (SIMBAD). The trained RF model is applied to point-like sources in DESI-LIS Data Release 9. To quantify the classifier's performance, we also inject a testing set into the to-be-applied data. Eventually, we obtained $1,953,932$ Grade-A quasar candidates and $22,486,884$ Grade-B quasar candidates out of $425,540,269$ sources ($\sim 5.7\%$). The catalog covers $\sim 99\%$ of quasars in the to-be-applied data by evaluating the completeness of the classification on the testing set. The statistical properties of the candidates agree with that given by the method of color-cut selection. Our catalog can intensely decrease the workload for confirming quasars with the upcoming DESI data by eliminating enormous non-quasars but remaining high completeness. All data in this paper is publicly available online.

arXiv comment11 figures, 13 pages, 3 tables; accepted by RAA, comments welcome!

References in corpus (62)

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE): Mission Description and Initial On-orbit Performance
• Unified Schemes for Radio-Loud Active Galactic Nuclei
• Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies
• The many lives of active galactic nuclei: cooling flows, black holes and the luminosities and colours of galaxies
• Energy input from quasars regulates the growth and activity of black holes and their host galaxies
• The SIMBAD astronomical database
• Modeling feedback from stars and black holes in galaxy mergers
• SDSS-III: Massive Spectroscopic Surveys of the Distant Universe, the Milky Way Galaxy, and Extra-Solar Planetary Systems
• The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
• Reverberation Measurements for 17 Quasars and the Size-Mass-Luminosity Relations in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV: Mapping the Milky Way, Nearby Galaxies, and the Distant Universe
• A Catalog of Quasar Properties from SDSS DR7
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological Implications from two Decades of Spectroscopic Surveys at the Apache Point observatory
• Spectral Energy Distributions and Multiwavelength Selection of Type 1 Quasars
• H0LiCOW XIII. A 2.4% measurement of $H_0$ from lensed quasars: $5.3\sigma$ tension between early and late-Universe probes
• First stars V - Abundance patterns from C to Zn and supernova yields in the early Galaxy
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyα forest of BOSS DR11 quasars
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Overview and Early Data
• The 2dF QSO Redshift Survey - XII. The spectroscopic catalogue and luminosity function
• Quasar-Lyman $\alpha$ Forest Cross-Correlation from BOSS DR11 : Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
• Quasars, their host galaxies, and their central black holes
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Sixteenth Data Release
• Measuring the black hole masses of high redshift quasars
• Gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae in future wide-field optical imaging surveys
• The Quasar Accretion Disk Size -- Black Hole Mass Relation
• The Quasar Accretion Disk Size - Black Hole Mass Relation
• H0LiCOW I. $H_0$ Lenses in COSMOGRAIL's Wellspring: Program Overview
• The Bolometric Quasar Luminosity Function at z = 0-7
• The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection for Data Release Nine
• The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: a tomographic measurement of cosmic structure growth and expansion rate based on optimal redshift weights
• Sizes and Temperature Profiles of Quasar Accretion Disks from Chromatic Microlensing
• The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO Survey: The z<2.1 Quasar Luminosity Function from 5645 Quasars to g=21.85
• Quasar Accretion Disks Are Strongly Inhomogeneous
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection
• Exploring Reionization-Era Quasars III: Discovery of 16 Quasars at $6.4\lesssim z\lesssim 6.9$ with DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys and UKIRT Hemisphere Survey and Quasar Luminosity Function at $z\sim 6.7$
• A model-independent determination of the Hubble constant from lensed quasars and supernovae using Gaussian process regression
• The stellar and dark matter distributions in elliptical galaxies from the ensemble of strong gravitational lenses
• Evolution of the Cool Gas in the Circumgalactic Medium (CGM) of Massive Halos -- A Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) Survey of Ly$\alpha$ Emission around QSOs at $z\approx 2$
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) Sample
• Identifying galaxies, quasars, and stars with machine learning: A new catalogue of classifications for 111 million SDSS sources without spectra
• Imaging a Quasar Accretion Disk with Microlensing
• The Minimum Testable Abundance of Primordial Black Holes at Future Gravitational-Wave Detectors
• MusE GAs FLOw and Wind (MEGAFLOW) VIII. Discovery of a MgII emission halo probed by a quasar sightline
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Quasar (QSO) Sample
• The Sizes of Quasar Host Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program
• Measuring Quasar Variability with Pan-STARRS1 and SDSS
• Host galaxies of high-redshift quasars: supermassive black hole growth and feedback
• Broad Absorption Line Quasars with Redshifted Troughs: High-Velocity Infall or Rotationally Dominated Outflows?
• Machine learning Applied to Star-Galaxy-QSO Classification and Stellar Effective Temperature Regression
• Classifying Broad Absorption Line Quasars: Metrics, Issues and a New Catalogue Constructed from SDSS DR5
• The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) Quasar Survey: Quasar Properties from Data Release Two and Three
• Statistical strong lensing. I. Constraints on the inner structure of galaxies from samples of a thousand lenses
• Finding Quasars behind the Galactic Plane. I. Candidate Selections with Transfer Learning
• Probing the Inner Circumgalactic Medium and Quasar Illumination around the Reddest `Extremely Red Quasar' (ERQ)
• The Probabilistic Random Forest applied to the selection of quasar candidates in the QUBRICS Survey
• Broadband spectral energy distributions of SDSS-selected quasars and of their host galaxies: intense activity at the onset of AGN feedback
• Star forming galaxies in the AKARI Deep Field South: identifications and SEDs
• The fraction of galaxies that contain active nuclei and their accretion rates
• Absorption-line Environments of High-redshift BOSS Quasars
• A Search for Blazar Activity in Broad-Absorption-Line Quasars