Luminous WISE-selected Obscured, Unobscured, and Red Quasars in Stripe 82

Abstract

We present a spectroscopically complete sample of 147 infrared-color-selected AGN down to a 22 μm flux limit of 20 mJy over the 270 deg2 of the SDSS Stripe 82 region. Most of these sources are in the QSO luminosity regime (L bol 1012 L) and are found out to z3. We classify the AGN into three types, finding: 57 blue, unobscured Type-1 (broad-lined) sources; 69 obscured, Type-2 (narrow-lined) sources; and 21 moderately-reddened Type-1 sources (broad-lined and E(B-V) > 0.25). We study a subset of this sample in X-rays and analyze their obscuration to find that our spectroscopic classifications are in broad agreement with low, moderate, and large amounts of absorption for Type-1, red Type-1 and Type-2 AGN, respectively. We also investigate how their X-ray luminosities correlate with other known bolometric luminosity indicators such as [O III] line luminosity (L [OIII]) and infrared luminosity (L6 μ m). While the X-ray correlation with L [OIII] is consistent with previous findings, the most infrared-luminous sources appear to deviate from established relations such that they are either under-luminous in X-rays or over-luminous in the infrared. Finally, we examine the luminosity function (LF) evolution of our sample, and by AGN type, in combination with the complementary, infrared-selected, AGN sample of Lacy et al. (2013), spanning over two orders of magnitude in luminosity. We find that the two obscured populations evolve differently, with reddened Type-1 AGN dominating the obscured AGN fraction (30%) for L5 μ m > 1045 erg s-1, while the fraction of Type-2 AGN with L5 μ m < 1045 erg s-1 rises sharply from 40% to 80% of the overall AGN population.

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