Moderate resolution spectra have been recorded for a sample of radio-selected QSOs (z ∼ 2.5) discovered in the “Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters” (FIRST) VLA survey. This work is motivated by the study of a heterogeneous set of QSO absorption line spectra that showed that as many as 36% of the absorbers normally thought to be intergalactic are correlated with physical propert...

I review our current understanding of the structures and ages of the host galaxies of quasars, and the masses of their central black holes. At low redshift, due largely to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope, there is now compelling evidence that the hosts of quasars with MV < −24 mag are virtually all massive ellipticals, with basic properties indistinguishable from those displayed by the...

Reverberation mapping of nearby active galactic nuclei has led to estimates of broad-line-region (BLR) sizes and central-object masses for some 37 objects to date. However, successful reverberation mapping has yet to be performed for quasars of either high luminosity (above Lopt ∼ 1046 erg s−1) or high redshift (z & 0.3). Over the past six years, we have carried out, at the Hobby-Eberly Telesco...

In the frame of unification schemes for radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGNs), FR I radio galaxies are believed to be BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects with the relativistic jet misaligned to our line of sight, and FR II radio galaxies correspond to misaligned radio quasars. The Ledlow-Owen dividing line for FR I/FR II dichotomy in the optical absolute magnitude of host galaxy–radio luminosity (M...

We report the detection of extended X-ray emission around several powerful 3CR quasars with redshifts out to 0.73. The ROSAT HRI images of the quasars have been corrected for spacecraft wobble and compared with an empirical point-spread-function. All the quasars examined show excess emission at radii of 15 arcsec and more; the evidence being strong for the more distant objects and weak only for...

In this paper I investigate the γ-ray spectra of AGN by summing up the intensity and the power-law fit statistic of Quasars and OVV’s and BL Lac’s separately. The spectrum of the average AGN is softer than that of the extragalactic γ-ray background. It may be that BL Lac’s, of which the average has a harder spectrum than Quasars, make up the bulk of the extragalactic background. We also find cu...

Increasing numbers of active galaxies with significant alignments of quasars are being observed. It is the purpose of this paper to explore ejection dynamics of these quasars using the variable mass hypothesis (VMH) originally discussed by Narlikar and Das in 1980. According to the VMH quasars are ejected from parent galaxies initially with zero rest mass which grows through a Machian interacti...

The ionizing continuum shape of quasars is generally not directly observable, but indirect arguments, based on photoionization models and thin accretion disk models suggest that it should peak in the extreme UV, and drop steeply into the soft X-ray regime. However, recent observations of very soft X-ray emission in low z quasars, and far UV emission of high z quasars, suggest that the ionizing ...

We present a new HST/STIS spectrum of the z = 3.18 quasar PKS 1935-692 and summarize the spectral features shortwards of 304 Å in the rest frame likely to be caused by foreground HeII Lyman-α absorption. In accord with previous results on two other quasars at similar redshifts, we demonstrate a correlation with the HI Lyman-α forest absorption, and show that much of the helium absorption is cau...

Upper limits to the one-millimeter continuum flux densities of the high redshift quasars 82 1225 + 31, Ton 490, and PHL 957 are presented. The upper limit to the power observed from these quasars at I mm is, on average, ! the observed power in the continuum at La. These observations are used to constrain the temperature of a hypoth'etical dust shell which reddens the quasar line and continuum e...