Extreme BAL Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Hall, Patrick B.; Gunn, J. E.; Knapp, G. R.; Narayanan, V. K.; Strauss, M. A.; Anderson, S. F.; Berk, D. E. Vanden; Heckman, T. M.; Krolik, J. H.; Tsvetanov, Z. I.; Zheng, W.; Richards, G. T.; Schneider, D. P.; Fan, X.; York, D. G.; Geballe, T. R.; Davis, M.; Becker, R. H.; Brunner, R. J.

Extreme BAL Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Authors

Description

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has discovered a population of broad absorption line quasars with various extreme properties. Many show absorption from metastable states of FeII with varying excitations; several objects are almost completely absorbed bluewards of MgII; at least one shows stronger absorption from FeIII than FeII, indicating temperatures T>35000 K in the absorbing region; and one object even seems to have broad H-beta absorption. Many of these extreme BALs are also heavily reddened, though `normal' BALs (particularly LoBALs) from SDSS also show evidence for internal reddening.
6 pages, 5 figures. To appear in Mass Outflow in Active Galactic Nuclei: New Perspectives, eds. D. M. Crenshaw, S. B. Kraemer, and I. M. George