Viewing Angle Effects in Quasar Application to Cosmology

The symmetry axes of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are randomly distributed in space, but highly inclined sources are heavily obscured and are not seen as quasars with broad emission lines. The obscuring torus geometry determines the average viewing angle, and if the torus geometry changes with the redshift, this average viewing angle will also change. Thus, the ratio between the isotropic luminosity and observed luminosity may change systematically with redshift. Therefore, if we use quasars to measure the luminosity distance by evaluating the isotropic absolute luminosity and measuring the observed flux, we can have a redshift-dependent bias that can propagate to cosmological parameters. We propose a toy model for testing the effect of viewing angle uncertainty on the measurement of the luminosity distance. The model is based on analytical description of the obscuring torus applied to one-parameter observational data. It illustrates the possible change of the torus covering factor between the two chosen redshift ranges. We have estimated the possible errors in specific cosmological parameters (H-0, omega(m)) for the flat Lambda cold dark matter cosmology if a method is calibrated at low redshift and applied to the higher redshift. The errors in the cosmological parameters due to potential dependence of the viewing angle on redshift are found to be potentially significant, and the effect will have to be accommodated in the future in all quasar-based cosmological methods. A careful systematic study of AGNs means that a viewing angle across the redshift is necessary, with the use of appropriate samples and models that uniquely determine the inclination of each source.

Automated summary

This study indicates that the inclination of the symmetry axis can affect the observation of active galactic nuclei, and as the geometry of the obscuring torus changes, the average viewing angle may also change, potentially leading to biases in luminosity distance measurements. The dependence of the viewing angle on redshift must be considered in cosmological methods based on quasars.