Extremely Red Quasars in BOSS
Fred Hamann, Nadia L. Zakamska, Nicholas Ross, Isabelle Paris, Rachael, M. Alexandroff, Carolin Villforth, Gordon T. Richards, Hanna Herbst, W. Niel, Brandt, Ben Cook, Kelly D. Denney, Jenny E. Greene, Donald P. Schneider,, Michael A. Strauss

TL;DR
This paper introduces a catalog of extremely red quasars from BOSS, revealing their unique emission-line properties, physical conditions, and suggesting they are a distinct obscured quasar population with powerful outflows.
Contribution
The study provides a comprehensive catalog and analysis of ERQs, identifying their peculiar emission-line features and proposing they are a unique obscured quasar population with extreme outflow conditions.
Findings
ERQs have large REWs and unusual line profiles.
They exhibit high luminosities and flat/blue UV spectra despite red colors.
ERQs show signatures of powerful outflows and are not explained by simple dust reddening.
Abstract
Red quasars are candidate young objects in an early transition stage of massive galaxy evolution. Our team recently discovered a population of extremely red quasars (ERQs) in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) that has a suite of peculiar emission-line properties including large rest equivalent widths (REWs), unusual "wingless" line profiles, large NV/Lya, NV/CIV, SiIV/CIV and other flux ratios, and very broad and blueshifted [OIII] 5007. Here we present a new catalog of CIV and NV emission-line data for 216,188 BOSS quasars to characterize the ERQ line properties further. We show that they depend sharply on UV-to-mid-IR color, secondarily on REW(CIV), and not at all on luminosity or the Baldwin Effect. We identify a "core" sample of 97 ERQs with nearly uniform peculiar properties selected via i-W3 > 4.6 (AB) and REW(CIV) > 100 A at redshifts 2.0-3.4. A broader search…
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