Abstract
The ESA mission Gaia will furnish a complete census of the Milky Way, delivering astrometrics, dynamics, and astrophysics information for 1 billion stars. Operating in all-sky repeated survey mode, Gaia will also provide measurements of extra-galactic objects. Among the later there will be at least 500,000 QSOs that will be used to build the reference frame upon which the several independent observations will be combined and interpreted. Not all the QSOs are equally suited to fulfill this role of fundamental, fiducial grid-points. Brightness, morphology, and variability define the astrometric error budget for each object. We made use of 3 morphological parameters based on the PSF sharpness, circularity and gaussianity, which enable us to distinguish the "real point-like" QSOs. These parameters are being explored on the spectroscopically certified QSOs of the SDSS DR7, to compare the performance against other morphology classification schemes, as well as to derive properties of the host galaxy. We present a new method, based on the Gaia quasar database, to derive absolute magnitudes, on the SDSS filters domain. The method can be extrapolated all over the optical window, including the Gaia filters. We discuss colors derived from SDSS apparent magnitudes and colors based on absolute magnitudes that we obtained tanking into account corrections for dust extinction, either intergalactic or from the QSO host, and for the Lyman α forest. In the future we want to further discuss properties of the host galaxies, comparing for e.g. the obtained morphological classification with the color, the apparent and absolute magnitudes, and the redshift distributions.
