The correlation of line strength with luminosity and redshift from composite QSO spectra

Abstract

We have generated a series of composite QSO spectra using over 22000 individual low resolution (~8A) QSO spectra obtained from the 2dF (18.25<bj<20.85) and 6dF (16<bj<18.25) QSO Redshift Surveys. The large size of the catalogue has enabled us to construct composite spectra in narrow redshift (dz=0.25) and absolute magnitude (dMb=0.5) bins. The median number of QSOs in each composite is ~200, yielding typical S/N of ~100. For a given redshift interval, the composite spectra cover a factor of over 25 in luminosity. Using the composite spectra we have measured the equivalent widths (EWs) of the major broad and narrow emission lines, and the CaII K absorption feature due to the host galaxy of the AGN. Assuming a fixed host galaxy spectral energy distribution (SED), the correlation between CaII K EW and luminosity implies Lgal proportional to Lqso**{0.42+-0.05}. We find strong anti-correlations with luminosity for the EWs of [OII] and [NeV]. These provide hints to the general fading of the NLR in high luminosity sources which we attribute to the NLR dimensions becoming larger than the host galaxy. If average AGN host galaxies have SEDs similar to average galaxies, then the observed narrow [OII] emission could be solely due to the host galaxy at low luminosities (M_B~-20). We measure highly significant Baldwin effects for most broad emission lines (CIV, CIII], MgII, Hbeta, Hgamma) and show that they are predominantly due to correlations with luminosity, not redshift. We find that the Hbeta and Hgamma Balmer lines show an inverse Baldwin effect and are positively correlated with luminosity, unlike the broad UV lines. We postulate that this previously unknown effect is due to a luminosity dependent change in the the ratio of disk to non-disk continuum components (abridged).

20 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (1)

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