Reddening of Cold Quasars

Anika Goel, Dr. Allison Kirkpatrick, Kevin Cooke Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Kansas We have measured the reddening for a small sample of Cold Quasars in the Stripe 82 survey. These quasars are unobscured, yet have substantial dust masses measured through their far-IR emission. To determine the extinction, we fit a model consisting of an unobscured Quasar template, an SMC dust model (Draine 2003), and a reddening law to the optical spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Measuring the reddening and the extinction of the Cold Quasars is an essential component to finding the dust and gas environment surrounding the quasar. We compare our reddening parameters with the reddening measured in Red Quasars, to test whether the two populations are related. This information will give us more insight into the workings of this species of quasars and most importantly, help us gain more information about the process of galaxy evolution.