Hot-Dust-Poor Quasars in Mid-Infrared and Optically Selected Samples

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that Hot-Dust-Poor quasars are common across various optical and infrared selected samples, suggesting a universal phenomenon possibly linked to warped accretion disks or dust destruction near black holes.

Contribution

It reveals the prevalence of HDP quasars in multiple samples and proposes a unified explanation involving warped fueling disks or dust removal mechanisms.

Findings

HDP quasars constitute about 8.7% to 9.5% of samples.

HDP quasars are more likely to have weak host galaxy contributions.

The distribution of dust covering factors suggests a continuum related to disk warping.

Abstract

We show that the Hot-Dust-Poor (HDP) quasars, originally found in the X-ray selected XMM-COSMOS type 1 AGN sample, are just as common in two samples selected at optical/infrared wavelengths: the Richards et al. Spitzer/SDSS sample ($8.7%\pm2.2%$), and the PG-quasar dominated sample of Elvis et al. ($9.5%\pm 5.0%$). The properties of the HDP quasars in these two samples are consistent with the XMM-COSMOS sample, except that, at the $99% (\sim 2.5\sigma)$ significance, a larger proportion of the HDP quasars in the Spitzer/SDSS sample have weak host galaxy contributions, probably due to the selection criteria used. Either the host-dust is destroyed (dynamically or by radiation), or is offset from the central black hole due to recoiling. Alternatively, the universality of HDP quasars in samples with different selection methods and the continuous distribution of dust covering factor in type 1 AGNs, suggest that the range of SEDs could be related to the range of tilts in warped fueling disks, as in the model of Lawrence and Elvis (2010), with HDP quasars having relatively small warps.