Updated measurements of the dark matter halo masses of obscured quasars with improved WISE and Planck data

TL;DR

This study uses improved WISE and Planck data to refine measurements of dark matter halo masses of obscured and unobscured quasars, revealing higher bias for obscured quasars but with reduced statistical significance.

Contribution

It provides updated, more reliable measurements of quasar bias and halo mass using new data, and compares the effects of different survey pipelines on results.

Findings

Obscured quasars have higher bias and halo mass than unobscured quasars.

Allwise data improves measurement reliability over previous WISE data.

Results show reduced significance, challenging simple orientation models.

Abstract

Using the most recent releases of WISE and Planck data, we perform updated measurements of the bias and typical dark matter halo mass of infrared-selected obscured and unobscured quasars, using the angular autocorrelation function and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing cross-correlations. Since our recent work of this kind, the WISE Allwise catalogue was released with improved photometry, and the Planck mission was completed and released improved products. These new data provide a more reliable measurement of the quasar bias and provide an opportunity to explore the role of changing survey pipelines in results downstream. We present a comparison of IR color-selected quasars, split into obscured and unobscured populations based on optical-IR colors, selected from two versions of the WISE data. Which combination of data is used impacts the final results, particularly for obscured quasars, both because of mitigation of some systematics and because the newer catalogue provides a slightly different sample. We show that Allwise data is superior in several ways, though there may be some systematic trends with Moon contamination that were not present in the previous catalogue. We opt currently for the most conservative sample that meet our selection criteria in both the previous and new WISE catalogues. We measure a higher bias and halo mass for obscured quasars ($b_{\textrm{obsc}} \sim 2.1$, $b_{\textrm{unob}} \sim 1.8$) --- at odds with simple orientation models --- but at a reduced significance ($\sim$1.5$\sigma$) as compared to our work with previous survey data.