The WISSH quasars Project: II. Giant star nurseries in hyper-luminous quasars

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spectral energy distributions of hyper-luminous quasars to understand the interplay between quasar activity and star formation, revealing extreme luminosities, hot dust components, and a new quasar-star formation luminosity relation.

Contribution

It provides detailed SED modeling of the brightest quasars, identifying a hotter dust component in some, and establishes a new correlation between quasar and star formation luminosities.

Findings

Most SEDs fit standard accretion disk+torus and cold dust models.

About 30% of quasars show a hotter dust component at 750K.

Derived a new relation: star formation luminosity scales with quasar luminosity to the power 0.73.

Abstract

Studying the coupling between the energy output produced by the central quasar and the host galaxy is fundamental to fully understand galaxy evolution. Quasar feedback is indeed supposed to dramatically affect the galaxy properties by depositing large amounts of energy and momentum into the ISM. In order to gain further insights on this process, we study the SEDs of sources at the brightest end of the quasar luminosity function, for which the feedback mechanism is supposed to be at its maximum. We model the rest-frame UV-to-FIR SEDs of 16 WISE-SDSS Selected Hyper-luminous (WISSH) quasars at 1.8 < z < 4.6 disentangling the different emission components and deriving physical parameters of both the nuclear component and the host galaxy. We also use a radiative transfer code to account for the contribution of the quasar-related emission to the FIR fluxes. Most SEDs are well described by a standard combination of accretion disk+torus and cold dust emission. However, about 30% of them require an additional emission component in the NIR, with temperatures peaking at 750K, which indicates the presence of a hotter dust component in these powerful quasars. We measure extreme values of both AGN bolometric luminosity (LBOL > 10^47 erg/s) and SFR (up to 2000 Msun/yr). A new relation between quasar and star-formation luminosity is derived (LSF propto LQSO^(0.73)) by combining several Herschel-detected quasar samples from z=0 to 4. Future observations will be crucial to measure the molecular gas content in these systems, probe the impact between quasar-driven outflows and on-going star-formation, and reveal the presence of merger signatures in their host galaxies.