Detection Prospects of Local Super-Massive Black Holes Based on the Sloan-Digital Sky Survey

Abstract

We use the Sloan-Digital Sky Survey quasar catalog to statistically infer the local abundance of black holes heavier than $10^8{M}_{\odot }$, which allows us to estimate the detection prospect of super-massive black holes by future observational campaigns. We find that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) should be able to resolve, with integral field spectroscopy techniques, the gravitational influence of $\sim 10^3$ black holes within a sphere of $\sim 50\mathrm{Mpc}$. A Very-Long Baseline (VLB) observatory with one receiver placed in a geostationary orbit, is predicted to capture $\sim 10$ images of the silhouette of a black hole, similar to the image of $M87^{\ast }$ recently performed by the Event Horizon Telescope.

Submitted for publication on February 16, 2021