SFR as a function of stellar mass (M_*) for the QSO2 candidates (black dots) on a logarithmic scale. The star formation MS described by Schreiber et al. (2015) at the mean SDSS spectroscopic redshift of our candidates (z = 1.1) is shown as a solid line, with dashed lines indicating a 0.4 dex deviation. The contours display the M_*–SFR distribution for X-ray and optically selected AGN2s from the zCOSMOS survey by Bongiorno et al. (2012) with redshifts 1 ≤ z ≤ 2 (orange) and for the control sample of SDSS galaxies (blue).