Mike Brotherton Zhaohui Shang, Rajib Ganguly, and the rest of Team Brotherton Wyoming

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Mike BrothertonZhaohui Shang, Rajib Ganguly, and
the rest of Team Brotherton Wyoming
Busting Myths About
BALQSOs
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What Myths?

• Busted Myth BALQSOs are exclusively radio-quiet
  (busted years ago, Becker et al. 1997, 2000
  Brotherton et al. 1998 Gregg et al. 2000 Menou
  et al. 2001, Brotherton et al. 2002, etc.)
• Myth? BALQSOs are X-ray faint, and must be seen
  through simple, large column density absorbers
  (e.g., Green Mathur 1996), making them hard
  X-ray sources
• Myth BALQSOs are superaccretors, operating at
  the Eddington Limit (e.g., Boroson 2002)
• Myth BALQSOs are normal QSOs seen edge-on
  through an equatorial wind (e.g., almost everyone)

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Simple High Column X-ray Absorption?

• Brotherton et al. (2005) for radio-loud BALQSOs,
  looking at radio-X-ray correlation, shows large
  suppression in X-rays, but SOFT!

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Simple High Column X-ray Absorption?

• Busted!
• X-rays are consistently weak relative to the
  optical and radio emission, but
• Soft X-rays indicate that the absorbers only
  partially cover the X-ray source, or perhaps are
  partially ioinzed. Consistent with work by Sarah
  Gallagher and others on radio-quiet BALQSOs.

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SuperAccretors?

• Ganguly et al. (2007) looking at SDSS QSOs, with
  BALQSOs red. Slight deficit at low L/Ledd, but
  plenty at small ratios.

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SuperAccretors?

• Ganguly et al. (2007) There is an effect
  between Vmax luminosity, consistent with Laor
  Brandts work (green line, open green squares)
  and with radiative acceleration. Red is again
  our SDSS BALQSO sample.

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SuperAccretors?

• Busted!
• BALQSOs more common among the most luminous QSOs,
  and plenty of QSOs operating at a few percent of
  Eddington have BALs. Myth is likely part of the
  legacy of PG selection effect and an overly
  simple perception of Boroson Greens
  eigenvector 1.

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Edge-On Only?

• Back 15 years ago, Barthel and others proposed
  unified schemes for BALQSOs, akin to those for
  Seyferts, but werent wedded to the idea of
  edge-on only geometries. During the 1990s,
  edge-on became the paradigm, based on suggestive
  but not conclusive spectropolarimetry, in my
  opinion.

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Edge-On Only?

• Spectropolarimetry of PKS 0040-005, a radio-loud
  FR II BALQSO. Low intrinsic polarization,
  electric vector PARALLEL to the large-scale radio
  axis.

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Edge-On Only?
Type 1 seen from face on to close to edge on.
Equatorial and polar scattering. Type 1
BALQSOs Type 2 seen edge-on, polar scattering.
Seyferts (Shaded), BLRGs, and quasars. Hidden
BLR Seyferts (Shaded) and radio galaxies

• Brotherton et al. 2006, following Antonucci in
  the early 1980s who noted trends among radio and
  polarization axes in Seyfert galaxies. Today,
  type 1 Seyferts shows both parallel and
  perpendicular axes, consistent with both
  equatorial and polar scattering regions. PKS
  0040-005 shows characteristics of a type 1
  Seyfert seen at a mild angle.

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Edge-On Only?

• Busted!
• Definitely not only edge on. In addition to
  the new optical spectropolarimetry, observations
  at other wavelengths, especially the radio (e.g.,
  Zhou et al. 2006), show that there are face-on
  BAL winds. Many properties are inconsistent with
  unifying BALQSOs with normal quasars via only
  orientation.