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Session 39 - AGN Surveys.
Display session, Tuesday, January 14
Metropolitan Ballroom,

[39.02] The FIRST Radio-Loud Broad Absorption Line QSO and Evidence for a Hidden Population of Quasars

M. D. Gregg (LLNL), R. H. Becker (U. California, Davis), I. M. Hook (U. California, Berkeley), R. L. White (STScI), D. J. Helfand (Columbia Astrophysics Lab.), R. G. McMahon (Inst. of Astronomy, Cambridge)

We report the discovery of two low-ionization broad absorption line quasars in programs to obtain optical spectra for radio-selected quasar candidates from the FIRST Survey (Becker, White, amp; Helfand 1995, ApJ 450, 559). Both belong to the extremely rare class of BAL QSOs which exhibit narrow absorption lines from metastable excited levels of Fe II and Fe III. Until now, there was just a single object in this class, 0059-2735 (Hazard et al.\ 1987 ApJ 282, 33). One of our new objects is the first known radio-loud BAL QSO.

The properties of these three unusual objects suggest a trend of increasing radio luminosity with the amount of absorption to the quasar; these are perhaps transition objects between radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars. The most heavily absorbed has an optical luminosity 2 magnitudes fainter than the others. The new BALs were found in two radio-selected samples comprising less than 200 quasars. These objects may be representatives of a largely undetected component of the quasar population; this is consistent with a number of previous studies suggesting that there may be significant numbers of heavily obscured quasars that are missed in optical searches.

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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: gregg@igpp.llnl.gov

Program listing for Tuesday