HYPERION: broad-band X-ray-to-near-infrared emission of Quasars in the first billion years of the Universe

TL;DR

This study characterizes the broad-band emission of luminous quasars in the first billion years of the universe, providing a uniform catalog of their properties and comparing their spectral energy distributions to lower-redshift quasars.

Contribution

It offers a revised bolometric correction factor for high-redshift quasars and constructs a mean SED from X-ray to NIR, highlighting similarities and differences with lower-redshift quasars.

Findings

UV-optical emission modeled with z~2 QSO templates

Revised bolometric correction BC_3000A=3.3 for z≥6 QSOs

Mean SED shows good match with lower-redshift QSOs, with enhanced hot dust contribution.

Abstract

We aim at characterizing the X-ray-to-optical/near-infrared broad-band emission of luminous QSOs in the first Gyr of cosmic evolution to understand whether they exhibit differences compared to the lower-\textit{z} QSO population. Our goal is also to provide for these objects a reliable and uniform catalog of SED fitting derivable properties such as bolometric and monochromatic luminosities, Eddington ratios, dust extinction, strength of the hot dust emission. We characterize the X-ray/UV emission of each QSO using average SEDs from luminous Type 1 sources and calculate bolometric and monochromatic luminosities. Finally we construct a mean SED extending from the X-rays to the NIR bands. We find that the UV-optical emission of these QSOs can be modelled with templates of $z\sim$2 luminous QSOs. We observe that the bolometric luminosities derived adopting some bolometric corrections at 3000 \AA\ ($BC_{3000\text{\AA}}$) largely used in the literature are slightly overestimated by 0.13 dex as they also include reprocessed IR emission. We estimate a revised value, i.e. $BC_{3000\text{\AA}}=3.3 $ which can be used for deriving $L_\text{bol}$ in \textit{z} $\geq$ 6 QSOs. A sub-sample of 11 QSOs is provided with rest-frame NIR photometry, showing a broad range of hot dust emission strength, with two sources exhibiting low levels of emission. Despite potential observational biases arising from non-uniform photometric coverage and selection biases, we produce a X-ray-to-NIR mean SED for QSOs at \textit{z} $\gtrsim$ 6, revealing a good match with templates of lower-redshift, luminous QSOs up to the UV-optical range, with a slightly enhanced contribution from hot dust in the NIR.