PKS 2349–014: A Luminous Quasar with Thin Wisps, a Large Off-Center Nebulosity, and a Close Companion Galaxy

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Hubble Space Telescope ( HST ) images (WFC2) of PKS 2349-014 show that this luminous nearby quasar is interacting with diffuse (presumably galactic) material. Two thin wisps that have a total extent of about 20 kpc (for H 0 = 100 km s -1 Mpc -1 and Ω 0 = 1.0) are observed to approximately surround the quasar. One of the wisps appears to pass through a companion galaxy that is located at a projected distance of 3 kpc from the center of the quasar light. The companion galaxy, if located at the distance of PKS 2349-014, has an intrinsic size and luminosity similar to the Large Magellanic Cloud. A faint extended nebulosity, which is detected over a region of 35 kpc × 50 kpc and is centered about 5 kpc from the quasar nucleus, overlaps the wisps. The immediate environment of PKS 2349-014 is different from the environments of the other eight luminous quasars that we have studied previously with HST . If the multiple light components of the HST images are fit to a single de Vaucouleurs profile, as was done in previous analyses of ground-based data, then the result obtained for the total luminosity of the model galaxy is in agreement with the earlier ground-based studies.