Discovery of spectacular quasar-driven superbubbles in red quasars

Lu Shen; Guilin Liu; Zhicheng He; Nadia L Zakamska; Eilat Glikman; Jenny E Greene; Weida Hu; Guobin Mou; Dominika Wylezalek; David S N Rupke

doi:10.1126/sciadv.adg8287

Discovery of spectacular quasar-driven superbubbles in red quasars

Sci Adv. 2023 Jul 14;9(28):eadg8287. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adg8287. Epub 2023 Jul 12.

Authors

Lu Shen^{1

2

3}, Guilin Liu^{1

2}, Zhicheng He^{1

2}, Nadia L Zakamska⁴, Eilat Glikman⁵, Jenny E Greene⁶, Weida Hu^{1

2

7}, Guobin Mou⁸, Dominika Wylezalek⁹, David S N Rupke¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
² School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4242, USA.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
⁵ Department of Physics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA.
⁶ Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
⁸ Department of Astronomy, School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China.
⁹ Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Mönchhofstr 12-14, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
¹⁰ Department of Physics, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN 38112, USA.

Abstract

Quasar-driven outflows on galactic scales are a routinely invoked ingredient for galaxy formation models. We report the discovery of ionized gas nebulae surrounding three luminous red quasars at z ~ 0.4 from Gemini integral field unit observations. All these nebulae feature unprecedented pairs of "superbubbles" extending ~20 kpc in diameter, and the line-of-sight velocity difference between the red- and blueshifted bubbles reaches up to ~1200 km/s. Their spectacular dual-bubble morphology (in analogy to the galactic "Fermi bubbles") and their kinematics provide unambiguous evidence for galaxy-wide quasar-driven outflows, in parallel with the quasi-spherical outflows similar in size from luminous type 1 and type 2 quasars at concordant redshift. These bubble pairs manifest themselves as a signpost of the short-lived superbubble "break-out" phase, when the quasar wind drives the bubbles to escape the confinement from the dense environment and plunge into the galactic halo with a high-velocity expansion.