Spectroscopy of QUBRICS quasar candidates: 1672 new redshifts and a Golden Sample for the Sandage Test of the Redshift Drift

Abstract

The QUBRICS (QUasars as BRIght beacons for Cosmology in the Southern hemisphere) survey aims at constructing a sample of the brightest quasars with z>~2.5, observable with facilities in the Southern Hemisphere. QUBRICS makes use of the available optical and IR wide-field surveys in the South and of Machine Learning techniques to produce thousands of bright quasar candidates of which only a few hundred have been confirmed with follow-up spectroscopy. Taking advantage of the recent Gaia Data Release 3, which contains 220 million low-resolution spectra, and of a newly developed spectral energy distribution fitting technique, designed to combine the photometric information with the Gaia spectroscopy, it has been possible to measure 1672 new secure redshifts of QUBRICS candidates, with a typical uncertainty ${\sigma }_z=0.02$. This significant progress of QUBRICS brings it closer to (one of) its primary goals: providing a sample of bright quasars at redshift 2.5 < z < 5 to perform the Sandage test of the cosmological redshift drift. A Golden Sample of seven quasars is presented that makes it possible to carry out this experiment in about 1500 hours of observation in 25 years, using the ANDES spectrograph at the 39m ELT, a significant improvement with respect to previous estimates.

11 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (17)

• ESPRESSO@VLT -- On-sky performance and first results
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Sixteenth Data Release
• Cosmic dynamics in the era of Extremely Large Telescopes
• Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Photometric Data Set for Cosmology
• A survey of luminous high-redshift quasars with SDSS and WISE II. the bright end of the quasar luminosity function at z ~ 5
• The Extremely Luminous Quasar Survey in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint. III. The South Galactic Cap Sample and the Quasar Luminosity Function at Cosmic Noon
• Forecasts of redshift drift constraints on cosmological parameters
• The spectroscopic follow-up of the QUBRICS bright quasar survey
• The space density of ultra-luminous QSOs at the end of reionization epoch by the QUBRICS Survey and the AGN contribution to the hydrogen ionizing background
• The Extremely Luminous Quasar Survey in the Pan-STARRS 1 Footprint (PS-ELQS)
• The Luminosity Function of bright QSOs at z~4 and implications for the cosmic ionizing background
• Ultra-luminous quasars at redshift $z>4.5$ from SkyMapper
• The Probabilistic Random Forest applied to the selection of quasar candidates in the QUBRICS Survey
• Cosmological impact of redshift drift measurements
• Forecasting cosmic acceleration measurements using the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• Eddington accreting Black Holes in the Epoch of Reionization
• The probabilistic random forest applied to the QUBRICS survey: improving the selection of high-redshift quasars with synthetic data

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Ultraviolet astronomical spectrograph calibration with laser frequency combs from nanophotonic lithium niobate waveguides
• CatNorth: An Improved Gaia DR3 Quasar Candidate Catalog with Pan-STARRS1 and CatWISE
• Characterization of the ESPRESSO Line-Spread Function and Improvement of the Wavelength Calibration Accuracy
• The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole
• Perturbations of Cosmological Redshift Drift
• The ESPRESSO Redshift Drift Experiment I -- High-resolution spectra of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest of QSO J052915.80-435152.0
• Fundamental cosmology from ANDES precision spectroscopy
• Review of detector requirements: some challenges for the present
• FLRW Kinematic-Induced Measurement of the Hubble Constant from Cosmic Chronometer and Redshift Drift Observations
• Estimating the completeness of the QUBRICS Survey with 3501 QSO redshifts from Gaia DR3 spectra