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The Distribution and Evolution of Black Hole Mass in Broad Line Quasars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2010

Brandon C. Kelly ,
Marianne Vestergaard ,
Xiaohui Fan ,
Lars Hernquist ,
Philip Hopkins  and
Aneta Siemiginowska
Brandon C. Kelly
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA Email: [email protected]
Marianne Vestergaard
Affiliation:
Dark Cosmology Center, Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark
Xiaohui Fan
Affiliation:
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Lars Hernquist
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA Email: [email protected]
Philip Hopkins
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Aneta Siemiginowska
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA Email: [email protected]
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We present the first estimate of the black hole mass function (BHMF) of broad-line quasars (BLQSOs) that self-consistently corrects for incompleteness and the statistical uncertainty in the mass estimates, based on a sample of 9886 quasars at 1 < z < 4.5 drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We find evidence for “cosmic downsizing” of black holes in BLQSOs, where the peak in their number density shifts to higher redshift with increasing black hole mass. We estimate the lifetime of the BLQSO phase to be 70 ± 5 Myr for supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at z = 1 with a mass of MBH = 109M⊙, and we constrain the maximum mass of a black hole in a BLQSO to be ~ 1010M⊙. We find that most BLQSOs are not radiating at or near the Eddington limit. Our results are consistent with models for self-regulated black hole growth, where the BLQSO phase occurs at the end of a fueling event when black hole feedback unbinds the accreting gas.

Keywords

galaxies: activegalaxies: mass functionquasars: general
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 5 , Symposium S267: Co-Evolution of Central Black Holes and Galaxies , August 2009 , pp. 263
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010

References

Vestergaard, M., Fan, X., Tremonti, C. A., Osmer, P. S., & Richards, G. T. 2008, ApJ, 674, L1CrossRefGoogle Scholar