Eight new luminous z > 6 quasars selected via SED model fitting of VISTA, WISE and Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Observations

Understand

We present the discovery and spectroscopic confirmation with the ESO NTT and Gemini South telescopes of eight new 6.0 < z < 6.5 quasars with z$_{AB}$ < 21.0.

• These quasars were photometrically selected without any star-galaxy morphological criteria from 1533 deg$^{2}$ using SED model fitting to photometric data from the Dark Energy Survey (g, r, i, z, Y), the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (J, H, K) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (W1, W2).
• The photometric data was fitted with a grid of quasar model SEDs with redshift dependent Lyman-{\alpha} forest absorption and a range of intrinsic reddening as well as a series of low mass cool star models.
• Candidates were ranked using on a SED-model based $\chi^{2}$-statistic, which is extendable to other future imaging surveys (e.g.