Galaxy Clustering Around Nearby Luminous Quasars

We examine the clustering of galaxies around a sample of 20 luminous low redshift (z<0.30) quasars observed with the Wide Field Camera-2 on the Hubble Space Telescope. The HST resolution makes possible galaxy identification brighter than V=23.5 and as close as 2'' to the quasar. We find a significant enhancement of galaxies within a projected separation of < 100 kpc/h of the quasars. If we model the qso/galaxy correlation function as a power law with a slope given by the galaxy/galaxy correlation function, we find that the ratio of the qso/galaxy to galaxy/galaxy correlation functions is $3.8\pm 0.8$. The galaxy counts within r<15 kpc/h of the quasars are too high for the density profile to have an appreciable core radius ( > 100 kpc). Our results reinforce the idea that low redshift quasars are located preferentially in groups of 10-20 galaxies rather than in rich clusters. We see no significant difference in the clustering amplitudes derived from radio-loud and radio-quiet subsamples.

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