Spectroscopy of Quasar Candidates from SDSS Commissioning Data
Abstract
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has obtained images in five broad-band colors for several hundred square degrees. We present color-color diagrams for stellar objects, and demonstrate that quasars are easily distinguished from stars by their distinctive colors. Follow-up spectroscopy in less than ten nights of telescope time has yielded 22 new quasars, 9 of them at z> 3.65, and one with z = 4.75, the second highest-redshift quasar yet known. Roughly 80% of the high-redshift quasar candidates selected by color indeed turn out to be high-redshift quasars.
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