Welcome to the home page of the project "Quasar Main Sequence".

The aim of the project is to find a single critical parameter which determines most of the rich quasar properties.

News

2017-10-14 - COST in Bulgaria

(close to Varna - nice place at the Black See); COST meeting dedicated to the discussion of a book on astro-geo-statistics.


2017-08-26

Aloc Gupta and his student are visiting us for two days. He gave a talk, and we discussed variability issues.


2017-09-22 - Astroparticle meeting in Kraków

KRAC organizes this types of meeting every two years, to enhance collaboration, also of physicists and astronomers. Justyna was attending this meeting.


2017-09-14 - Meeting of the Polish Astronomical Society

In Zielona Góra this time. A trip to the vineyard was very nice. I showed just to posters, but Swayam and Conor gave talks.


2017-08-09 - X-ray spectroscopy meeting in Warsaw

I am not working a lot now in this field but it was nice to be in touch with the subject.


2017-07-16 - Sesto meeting

Last week I attended Sesto meeting "From the Dolomites to the event horizon: sledging down the black hole potential well". I talked about quasars in cosmology.


2017-06-30 - COST Action BigData SkyEarth meeting

also in Prague, just one day. Plans to write a book...


2017-06-30 - EWASS conference in Praque

Big as usual, over 1000 people. I gave a talk during the session organized by Michal Dovciak.


2017-06-09 - SALT conference in Kazimierz

Justyna attended this conference, presenting there our results from SALT quasar monitoring.


2017-04-24 - seminar in Wrocław

Astronomical Institute has a very nice location. I gave a talk, had a very nice discussions with people there.


2017-04-07 - conference in Padova

A number of us (bcz, Conor, Swayam and Justyna) attended a conference "Quasars at all cosmic epochs" organized by the University of Padova. It was extremely interesting, and succesfull. Me and Conor gave talks, and Swayam got an award for the best poster, and also gave a short talk as a form of an award.


2017-03-14 - Asia Kuraszkiewicz from US is comming

Asia, our collaborator from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will be helping in the choice of the quasar sample for modelling. She will stay in Warsaw for two weeks.


2017-03-09 - Our La Silla observations completed

It was a great experience, observations were performed as planned, occasional clouds stayed at the horizon and did not interfere with the observing conditions. 100 percent success!


2017-03-01 - Team expands

We still continue colleting the data with the SALT telescope (see SALT data). So our old regular collaborators: Magda Krupa and Agnieszka Świętoń joined formally the team. Also Justyna Średzińska is in the team again!


2017-02-27 - Our La Silla observations start in two days

I (bcz) came to Chile, to La Silla Observatory with the aim to perform the second part of the observations, this time in visitors' mode. Observations will be done with the NTT (New Technology Telescope). The telescope is particularly beautiful, no standard round dome, but is has a diameter of 3.6 m, and it was opened in 1989. New technologies used there were later applied to VLT. Our observing run starts in two days but some early preparations are necessary.


2017-02 - Data colletion with VLT completed

The data collection with VLT happens in a Service Mode. One of our objects has already been observed in October last year, the other two during this year. We can now downlead the data and start performing data reduction. We have the data priority for one year since the day of observation for every object. After that time the data becomes public - anybody can download it, analyse and publish a pepr. We cannot be too slow.


2017-01-13 - paper submitted

We submitted for publication the first paper written by the whole team. Marzena is the first author. We planed to study in detail a few selected extreme objects located along the quasar sequence. What we noticed is that we cannot relay on the values of parameters available from the literature. Only one of the selected objects is indeed extreme!


2016 - autumn

The team is expanding, as planned. The core of the project consist now of four of us: Bożena Czerny, Conor Wildy, Swayam Pand and Marzena Śniegowska.


2016-07-05 - ESO Proposals approved!

Poland is part of ESO since 2015, but being the ESO member does not guaratee any observing time. And it is not easy to get observing time, there are many more applications thn the available telescope time. So we are indeed extremely happy that our proposal was approved!


2016-04-09


International collaboration is nowaydays a key in most of the projects. Here B. Czerny visits LAMOST telescope in China.


2016-03-31 - submission of a proposal to ESO

Our Proposal ID: 098.B-0426 (Title: High Eddington ratio AGN: outflow geometry and black hole mass) has been succesfully submited to ESO. The sample was prepared by our Chinese collegues (mostly Pu Du), the description was prepared by a large group of collaborators. We plan to test whether polarimetry can reveil the true kinematic line broadenning, true inclination angles, and true black holes masses for a smaple of super-Eddington sources. We request observations both with VLT and with one of the La Silla telescopes.


2016-02-21

Official date of the project start. Project is financed by NCN, OPUS 9.