The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Twelfth data release
Full list of authors: Pâris, Isabelle; Petitjean, Patrick; Ross, Nicholas P.; Myers, Adam D.; Aubourg, Éric; Streblyanska, Alina; Bailey, Stephen; Armengaud, Éric; Palanque-Delabrouille, Nathalie; Yèche, Christophe; Hamann, Fred; Strauss, Michael A.; Albareti, Franco D.; Bovy, Jo; Bizyaev, Dmitry; Niel Brandt, W.; Brusa, Marcella; Buchner, Johannes; Comparat, Johan; Croft, Rupert A. C. Dwelly, Tom; Fan, Xiaohui; Font-Ribera, Andreu; Ge, Jian; Georgakakis, Antonis; Hall, Patrick B.; Jiang, Linhua; Kinemuchi, Karen; Malanushenko, Elena; Malanushenko, Viktor; McMahon, Richard G.; Menzel, Marie-Luise; Merloni, Andrea; Nandra, Kirpal; Noterdaeme, Pasquier; Oravetz, Daniel; Pan, Kaike; Pieri, Matthew M.; Prada, Francisco; Salvato, Mara; Schlegel, David J.; Schneider, Donald P.; Simmons, Audrey; Viel, Matteo; Weinberg, David H.; Zhu, Liu. ; We present the Data Release 12 Quasar catalog (DR12Q) from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. This catalog includes all SDSS-III/BOSS objects that were spectroscopically targeted as quasar candidates during the full survey and that are confirmed as quasars via visual inspection of the spectra, have luminosities M [z = 2] 2.15 (184 101, of which 167 742 are new discoveries) is about an order of magnitude greater than the number of z > 2.15 quasars known prior to BOSS. Redshifts and FWHMs are provided for the strongest emission lines (C iv, C iii], Mg ii). The catalog identifies 29 580 broad absorption line quasars and lists their characteristics. For each object, the catalog presents five-band (u, g, r, i, z) CCD-based photometry with typical accuracy of 0.03 mag together with some information on the optical morphology and the selection criteria. When available, the catalog also provides information on the optical variability of quasars using SDSS and Palomar Transient Factory multi-epoch photometry. The catalog also contains X-ray, ultraviolet, near-infrared, and radio emission properties of the quasars, when available, from other large-area surveys. The calibrated digital spectra, covering the wavelength region 3600-10 500 Å at a spectral resolution in the range 1300 < R < 2500, can be retrieved from the SDSS Catalog Archive Server. We also provide a supplemental list of an additional 4841 quasars that have been identified serendipitously outside of the superset defined to derive the main quasar catalog. © 2017 ESO. ; I.P. was supported by PRIN INAF 2012 "The X-Shooter sample of 100 quasar spectra at z-3.5:Digging into cosmology and galaxy evolution with quasar absorption lines". This work has been carried out thanks to the support of the A*MIDEX project (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the "Investissements d'Avenir" French Government program, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR). The French Participation Group to SDSS-III was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under contracts ANR-08-BLAN-0222 and ANR-12-BS05-0015. A.D.M was partially supported by NASA ADAP award NNX12AE38G and by NSF awards 1211112 and 1515404. W.N.B. was supported by NSF grant AST-1516784. I.P. thanks S. Twain, D. Hoff, D. Dintei and Brian A. J. Richardson for their inspiring contribution to this work. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University. AllWISE makes use of data from WISE, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. WISE and NEOWISE are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.