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C. Paul, M.S. Brotherton (Wyoming), A. Diamond-Stanic (Arizona), D. Vanden Berk (Penn State), G. Canalizo (UC-Riverside)
Post-starburst quasars are broad-lined AGN that also display the strong Balmer jumps and high-order Balmer absorption lines characteristic of a very massive stellar population with ages on the order of 100 Myrs. These sources are rare, representing a few percent of the quasar population. Their significance is not yet clear; they may represent an evolutionary phase common to all galaxies that shows how the correlation between black hole mass and stellar bulge mass arises, or they may represent a rare but particularly violent interaction that leads to both massive starbursts and nuclear activity.
With the advent of the new large quasar surveys like Sloan and the 2dF, it is now possible to find post-starburst quasars in sufficient numbers to investigate the niche this population fills. We have spectroscopically identified several hundred post-starburst quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and are in the process of estimating their stellar properties, their black hole properties, and their environments in a variety of ways.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: paul@uwyo.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.