Spatially Resolved Spectroscopy of Emission-line Gas in Qso Host Galaxies

We present off-nuclear spectra of 3 radio loud QSO’s, 3C249.1, 3C273 and 3C323.1., taken with the echellette spectrograph and imager (ESI) at Keck observatory. From these spectra we have extracted the spatial profile along the slit of the [OIII], λ = 5007 line. Fitted Gaussian distributions to each of these profiles show emission-line gas out to several tens of kiloparsecs from the galaxy nucleus. Most observations show several gas components at distinct velocities and velocity dispersions, much of which is above the escape velocity for any resonable mass galaxy. In addition, we show slitless spectroscopy images for one other object, 3C48. From the slitless spactroscopy images we can extract 2dimensional spatial as well as velocity information on the emission line gas. 1. Spatially resolved Off-Nuclear spectroscopy We have taken off-nuclear spectra of 3 radio loud QSO’s, 3C249.1, 3C273 and 3C323.1 (Boroson and Oke 1984), using the Echellette spectrograph and imager (ESI) (Sheinis et. al 2000) at Keck observatory. Each object was observed at several differant position angles and offsets from the nucleus. From these spectra we have extracted the spatial profile along the slit of the [OIII], λ = 5007 line. Each image is the median of four 15 minute exposures. The data were processed using the Information Data Language (IDL). They were first rectified to remove the instrument distortion, bias subtracted then a two dimensional sky model was subtracted. After this extraction we fit a linear combination of two Gaussian distributions to each of these profiles, using (IDL).