Smoking Quasars: a New Source for Cosmic Dust

Abstract

Although dust is widely found in astrophysics, forming dust is surprisingly difficult. The proper combination of low temperature (<2000 K) and high density is mainly found in the winds of late-type giant and supergiant stars which, as a result, are the most efficient sources of dust known. Dust ejected from these stars into the interstellar medium has multiple important effects, including obscuring background objects and enhancing star formation. We show here that quasars are also naturally copious producers of dust, if the gas clouds producing their characteristic broad lines are part of an outflowing wind. This offers an explanation for the strong link between quasars and dust, for the heavy nuclear obscuration around many quasars and introduces a new means of forming dust at early cosmological times.

12 pages, 2 figures, ApJ Letters, in press

References in corpus (2)

• A 1.2mm MAMBO/IRAM-30m Survey of Dust Emission from the Highest Redshift PSS Quasars
• The far-infrared--submm spectral energy distribution of high-redshift quasars

Cited by in corpus (87)

• The cosmological evolution of quasar black-hole masses
• Unusual Broad Absorption Line Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Dust emission from the most distant quasars
• Fast neutral outflows in powerful radio galaxies: a major source of feedback in massive galaxies
• The origin of the Broad Line Region in Active Galactic Nuclei
• The Evolution of Dust in the Early Universe with Applications to the Galaxy SDSS J1148+5251
• The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9
• Stellar sources of dust in the high redshift Universe
• The Compact, Conical, Accretion-Disk Warm Absorber of the Seyfert 1 Galaxy NGC 4051 and its Implications for IGM-Galaxy Feedback Processes
• The Quasar Outflow Contribution to AGN Feedback: VLT Measurements of SDSS J0318-0600
• Production of dust by massive stars at high redshift
• The origin of dust in high redshift QSOs: the case of SDSS J1148+5251
• The Origin of Dust in the Early Universe: Probing the Star Formation History of Galaxies by their Dust Content
• Redefining the torus: A unifying view of AGN in the infrared and sub-mm
• The extinction law at high redshift and its implications
• Probing the Evolution of IR Properties of z~6 Quasars: Spitzer Observations
• Dust-free quasars in the early Universe
• Cosmological simulation with dust formation and destruction
• The location of the broad HI absorption in 3C305: clear evidence for a jet-accelerated neutral outflow
• High-redshift quasars host galaxies: is there a stellar mass crisis?
• The Chandra Multiwavelength Project: Optical Followup of Serendipitous Chandra Sources
• Probing the Local Group Medium Toward Mkn 421 with Chandra and FUSE
• Extinction due to amorphous carbon grains in red quasars from the SDSS
• Genesis and evolution of dust in galaxies in the early Universe I. Modeling dust evolution in starburst galaxies
• The chemical evolution of elliptical galaxies with stellar and QSO dust production
• Discovery of Kiloparsec Extended Hard X-ray Continuum and Fe K alpha from the Compton Thick AGN ESO428-G014
• Polar Dust, Nuclear Obscuration and IR SED Diversity in Type-1 AGNs
• Modeling the Dust Properties of z ~ 6 Quasars with ART^2 -- All-wavelength Radiative Transfer with Adaptive Refinement Tree
• IR-derived covering factors for a large sample of quasars from WISE-UKIDSS-SDSS
• Dust formation in the ejecta of the Type II-P supernova 2004dj
• The dust content of QSO hosts at high redshift
• Extreme gas properties in the most distant quasars
• The Number Density of 0.6 < z < 1.7 MgII Systems from CORALS: Observational Biases at Intermediate Redshift
• X-ray lighthouses of the high-redshift Universe. Probing the most luminous z>4 Palomar Digital Sky Survey Quasars with Chandra
• Genesis and evolution of dust in galaxies in the early Universe II. Rapid dust evolution in quasars at z > 6
• Twelve type II-P supernovae seen with the eyes of Spitzer
• Dust in the wind: Crystalline silicates, corundum and periclase in PG 2112+059
• Dust in the early Universe: Evidence for non-stellar dust production or observational errors?
• The picture of BLR in 2.5-D FRADO: Dynamics & Geometry
• Anomalously Steep Reddening Law in Quasars: An Exceptional Example Observed in IRAS14026+4341
• Outflow and hot dust emission in broad absorption line quasars
• Lens-Aided Multi-Angle Spectroscopy (LAMAS) Reveals Small-Scale Outflow Structure in Quasars
• Anomalous Silicate Dust Emission in the Type 1 LINER Nucleus of M81
• Giant scattering cones in obscured quasars
• The High A(V) Quasar Survey: Reddened quasi-stellar objects selected from optical/near-infrared photometry - II
• The Physical Properties of Low Redshift FeLoBAL Quasars. I. Spectral Synthesis Analysis of the BAL Outflows using $SimBAL$
• GBT Detection of Polarization-dependent HI Absorption and HI Outflows in Local ULIRGs and Quasars
• Star and dust formation activities in AzTEC-3: A starburst galaxy at z = 5.3
• The Dusty Heart of NGC 4151 Revealed by $\lambda \sim$1-40 $\mu$m Reverberation Mapping and Variability: A Challenge to Current Clumpy Torus Models
• Rapid Luminosity Decline and Subsequent Reformation of the Innermost Dust Distribution in the Changing-look AGN Mrk 590
• Physical Properties of Luminous Dust Poor Quasars
• Fundamental differences in the properties of red and blue quasars: measuring the reddening and accretion properties with X-shooter
• Prospects for AGN studies with ALMA
• Origin of Dust around V1309 Sco
• Monitoring the temperature and reverberation delay of the circumnuclear hot dust in NGC 4151
• The Spitzer discovery of a galaxy with infrared emission solely due to AGN activity
• Dust formation in AGN winds
• Outflow and hot dust emission in high redshift quasars
• Energy distribution of individual quasars from far-UV to X-rays: I. Intrinsic UV hardness and dust opacities
• Effect of extinction on quasar luminosity distances determined from UV and X-ray flux measurements
• Long term X-ray spectral variability of the nucleus of M81
• Exploring Active Galactic Nuclei and Little Red Dots with the Obelisk simulation
• The crystalline fraction of interstellar silicates in starburst galaxies
• Dust in the Torus of the AGN Unified Model
• A Dusty Dawn: Galactic Dust Buildup at $z\gtrsim 5$
• Dusty plasma in active galactic nuclei
• Broad-line region in active galactic nuclei: Dusty or dustless?
• Molecular gas and dust properties in $z>7$ quasar hosts
• Dust Dynamics in AGN Winds: A New Mechanism For Multiwavelength AGN Variability
• The nature of HHL 73 from optical imaging and Integral Field Spectroscopy
• Non-LTE dust nucleation in sub-saturated vapors
• The interaction of the active nucleus with the host galaxy interstellar medium
• The mineralogy of newly formed dust in active galactic nuclei
• Active Galactic Nuclei and their Role in Galaxy Evolution: The Infrared Perspective
• Chemical evolution models: GRB host identification and cosmic dust predictions
• The Optical Variability of SDSS Quasars from Multi-epoch Spectroscopy. III. A Sudden UV Cutoff in Quasar SDSS J2317+0005
• Spatially Resolved Circumnuclear Dust in Centaurus A
• On the effects of microphysical grain properties on the yields of carbonaceous dust from type II SNe
• Infrared Emission from Supernova Remnants: Formation and Destruction of Dust
• Efficient Identification of Broad Absorption Line Quasars using Dimensionality Reduction and Machine Learning
• The 2175 Å~ Bump Features in FeLoBAL Quasars: One Indicator of MW-like Dust in the Nuclear Region of Quasar
• The XMM-SSC survey of hard-spectrum XMM-Newton sources 1: optically bright sources
• GATOS XI : Excess dust heating in the Narrow Line Regions of nearby AGN revealed with JWST/MIRI
• Prospects for Studies of Stellar Evolution and Stellar Death in the JWST Era
• Grating X-ray Spectroscopy of High-Velocity Outflows from Active Galaxies
• Observational Comparison of Star Formation in Different Galaxy Types
• Radio studies of galaxy formation: Dense Gas History of the Universe