Discovery of Eight z ~ 6 Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Overlap Regions
Linhua Jiang (Kavli Institute for A., A., Peking Univ.), Ian D., McGreer, Xiaohui Fan, Fuyan Bian, Zheng Cai, Benjamin Clement, Ran Wang, and, Zhou Fan

TL;DR
This study discovered eight new quasars at redshift ~6 in SDSS overlap regions, demonstrating the effectiveness of their selection method and enabling fainter quasar detection than previous single-epoch surveys.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel approach using SDSS overlap regions to identify fainter high-redshift quasars, expanding the known quasar population at z~6.
Findings
Discovered eight new quasars at z~6 in SDSS overlap regions.
Validated the candidate selection and follow-up procedure.
Revealed quasars fainter than previous magnitude limits.
Abstract
We present the discovery of eight quasars at z~6 identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) overlap regions. Individual SDSS imaging runs have some overlap with each other, leading to repeat observations over an area spanning >4000 deg^2 (more than 1/4 of the total footprint). These overlap regions provide a unique dataset that allows us to select high-redshift quasars more than 0.5 mag fainter in the z band than those found with the SDSS single-epoch data. Our quasar candidates were first selected as i-band dropout objects in the SDSS imaging database. We then carried out a series of follow-up observations in the optical and near-IR to improve photometry, remove contaminants, and identify quasars. The eight quasars reported here were discovered in a pilot study utilizing the overlap regions at high galactic latitude (|b|>30 deg). These quasars span a redshift range of…
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