Downsizing of supermassive black holes from the SDSS quasar survey

Abstract

Starting from the ~50000 quasars of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for which MgII line width and 3000 A monochromatic flux are available, we aim to study the dependence of the mass of active black holes on redshift. We focus on the observed distribution in the FWHM - nuclear luminosity plane, which can be reproduced at all redshifts assuming a limiting BH mass, a maximum Eddington ratio and a minimum luminosity (due to the survey flux limit). We study the z-dependence of the best fit parameters of assumed distributions at increasing redshift and find that the maximum mass of the quasar population evolves as log[M_BH(max)/M_Sun]~0.3z+9, while the maximum Eddington ratio (~0.45) is practically independent of cosmic time. These results are unaffected by the Malmquist bias.

9 pages, 9 figures. To appear in MNRAS

References in corpus (5)

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• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog IV. Fifth Data Release
• Mass Functions of the Active Black Holes in Distant Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 3
• The evolution of host mass and black hole mass in QSOs from the 2dF QSO Redshift Survey
• Near-infrared adaptive optics imaging of high redshift quasars

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• Multimessenger astronomy with pulsar timing and X-ray observations of massive black hole binaries
• The Demographics of Broad-Line Quasars in the Mass-Luminosity Plane. I. Testing FWHM-Based Virial Black Hole Masses
• AGN evolution from a galaxy evolution viewpoint
• SDSS J094533.99+100950.1 - the remarkable weak emission line quasar
• Cosmological Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes. II. Evidence for Downsizing of Spin Evolution
• The quasar M_bh - M_host relation through Cosmic Time I - Dataset and black hole masses
• The Extremely Luminous Quasar Survey (ELQS) in the SDSS footprint I.: Infrared Based Candidate Selection
• The Correlation between Black Hole Mass and Stellar Mass for Classical Bulges and the Cores of Ellipticals
• On the cosmological evolution of the black hole - host galaxy relation in quasars
• Downsizing of supermassive black holes from the SDSS quasar survey (II). Extension to z~4
• Mid-Infrared Selected Quasars I: Virial Black Hole Mass and Eddington Ratios
• The redshift and broad band spectral energy distribution of NRAO 150
• The Distribution and Cosmic Density of Relativistic Iron Lines in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Mass-dependent evolution of the relation between supermassive black hole mass and host spheroid mass since z ~ 1
• On the non-evolution of the dependence of black hole masses on bolometric luminosities for QSOs