Journal article
Using the properties of broad absorption line quasars to illuminate quasar structure
SY Yong, AL King, RL Webster, NF Bate, MJ O'Dowd, K Labrie
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2018
Abstract
A key to understanding quasar unification paradigms is the emission properties of broad absorption line quasars (BALQs). The fact that only a small fraction of quasar spectra exhibit deep absorption troughs blueward of the broad permitted emission lines provides a crucial clue to the structure of quasar emitting regions. To learn whether it is possible to discriminate between the BALQ and non-BALQ populations given the observed spectral properties of a quasar, we employ two approaches: one based on statistical methods and the other supervised machine learning classification, applied to quasar samples from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The features explored include continuum and emission line..
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Awarded by Science and Technology Facilities Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referee for valuable suggestions on the manuscript. NFB thanks the STFC for support under Ernest Rutherford Grant ST/M003914/1. This research has made use of the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France. The original description of the VizieR service was published in Ochsenbein et al. (2000). This research made use of the PYTHON libraries including open source packages such as astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), ipython (Perez & Granger 2007), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), numpy (van der Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011), pandas (McKinney 2010), scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011), and scipy (Jones et al. 2001).