Discovery of the most ultra-luminous QSO using Gaia, SkyMapper and WISE
Christian Wolf, Fuyan Bian, Christopher A. Onken, Brian P. Schmidt,, Patrick Tisserand, Noura Alonzi, Wei Jeat Hon, John L. Tonry

TL;DR
This paper reports the discovery of the most ultra-luminous, unlensed quasar at high redshift, identified through a combination of Gaia, SkyMapper, and WISE data, expanding our understanding of the brightest quasars in the universe.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel method combining Gaia proper-motion data with SkyMapper and WISE photometry to discover the most luminous unlensed quasar known.
Findings
Identified a quasar with the highest known UV-optical luminosity.
The quasar is unlikely to be strongly gravitationally lensed or beamed.
It exhibits weak emission lines and broad absorption features.
Abstract
We report the discovery of the ultra-luminous QSO SMSS~J215728.21-360215.1 with magnitude and W4 at redshift 4.75. Given absolute magnitudes of , and , it is the QSO with the highest unlensed UV-optical luminosity currently known in the Universe. It was found by combining proper-motion data from Gaia DR2 with photometry from SkyMapper DR1 and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). In the Gaia database it is an isolated single source and thus unlikely to be strongly gravitationally lensed. It is also unlikely to be a beamed source as it is not discovered in the radio domain by either NVSS or SUMSS. It is classed as a weak-emission-line QSO and possesses broad absorption line features. A lightcurve from ATLAS spanning the time from October 2015 to December 2017 shows little…
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