Quasar Mass Functions Across Cosmic Time

Abstract

I present mass functions of actively accreting black holes detected in different quasar surveys which in concert cover a wide range of cosmic history. I briefly address what we learn from these mass functions. I summarize the motivation for such a study and the methods by which we determine black hole masses.

9 pages, 6 figures, invited contribution to the 2009 IAU Symposium 267. This version has added arXiv info for a reference paper in press and comments on preliminary data presented in Figure 3 relative to the published contribution

References in corpus (6)

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• Mass Functions of the Active Black Holes in Distant Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 3
• An Improved Method for Using MgII to Estimate Black Hole Masses in Active Galactic Nuclei
• A Flexible Method of Estimating Luminosity Functions