Projeto Observacional para 2015B - SO2015B-001

Autor: José Eduardo Telles
Instituição: ON
e-mail: etelles@on.br

Co-autores:
Jorge Melnick
Roberto Propis

Título: The astrophysics of Post-Starburst Quasars

Resumo: Post-starburst quasars (PSQ) are AGN with strong Balmer absorption lines indicating prominent intermediateage stellar populations. HST imaging shows that PSQ in early-type galaxies are the descendants of major mergers. Thus, PSQ are just emerging from the ULIRG phase where the AGN grew enshrouded in dust, and in current merger evolution scenarios PSQ would be the immediate progenitors of post-starburst (K+A) galaxies. We compiled a sample of 73 bona- de SDSS PSQ to test this hypothesis. We find that PSQ lack the large populations of metal-rich intermediate-age stars that characterise K+A galaxies. Thus, either PSQ are not the immediate progenitors of K+As, or PSQ are still forming stars at a huge rate. Our results, however, are based on rather poor S/N SDSS spectra making our models still quite uncertain. We propose to obtain high S/N GOODMAN spectra to check our results on a sub-sample of 25 PSQ observable from Cerro Pachon.