Bright QSOs in Southern Hemisphere (QUBRICS)

Unfortunately, the number of bright (i<~18) QSOs at z>~2 in the southern hemisphere is much lower than that in the north, due to the lack of wide multiwavelength surveys at decl. {delta}<0{deg}, hampering the effectiveness of observations from southern observatories.

In this work we present a new method based on Canonical Correlation Analysis to identify such objects, taking advantage of a number of available databases: Skymapper, Gaia DR2, WISE, and 2MASS. Our QSO candidate sample lists 1476 sources with i<18 over 12400deg^2^ in the southern hemisphere. With a preliminary campaign we observed spectroscopically 69 of them, confirming 54 new bright QSOs at z>2.5, corresponding to a success rate of our method of ~80%.