EDDINGTON-LIMITED ACCRETION AND THE BLACK HOLE MASS FUNCTION AT REDSHIFT 6

By C. Willott, L. Albert, D. Arzoumanian, J. Bergeron, D. Crampton, P. Delorme, J. Hutchings, A. Omont, Céline Reylé, D. Schade. 2010

277 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present discovery observations of a quasar in the Canada–France High-z Quasar Survey (CFHQS) at redshift z = 6.44. We also use near-infrared spectroscopy of nine CFHQS quasars at z ∼ 6 to determine black hole masses. These are compared with similar estimates for more luminous Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars to investigate the relationship between black hole mass and quasar luminosity. We find a strong correlation between Mg ii FWHM and UV luminosity and that most quasars at this early epoch are accreting close to the Eddington limit. Thus, these quasars appear to be in an early stage of their life cycle where they are building up their black hole mass exponentially. Combining these results with the quasar luminosity function, we derive the black hole mass function at z = 6. Our black hole mass function is ∼104 times lower than at z = 0 and substantially below estimates from previous studies. The main uncertainties which could increase the black hole mass function are a larger population of obscured quasars at high redshift than is observed at low redshift and/or a low quasar duty cycle at z = 6. In comparison, the global stellar mass function is only ∼102 times lower at z = 6 than at z = 0. The difference between the black hole and stellar mass function evolution is due to either rapid early star formation which is not limited by radiation pressure as is the case for black hole growth or inefficient black hole seeding. Our work predicts that the black hole mass–stellar mass relation for a volume-limited sample of galaxies declines rapidly at very high redshift. This is in contrast to the observed increase at 4 < z < 6 from the local relation if one just studies the most massive black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2c9044c9577d85977b7bd0bd35d7bf49f9d589f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Hernquist
2. P. Hopkins
3. D. M. Alexander
4. M. Volonteri
5. Jenny E. Greene
6. H. Netzer
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In Instrumentation

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2. P. Hopkins
3. M. Volonteri
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5. D. M. Alexander
6. T. Treu
7. Y. Dubois
8. H. Netzer

Citations in the corpus

• THE PAN-STARRS1 DISTANT z > 5.6 QUASAR SURVEY: MORE THAN 100 QUASARS WITHIN THE FIRST GYR OF THE UNIVERSE (2016, background): “…(2007), (10) Jiang et al. (2008), (11) Jiang et al. (2009), (12) Kurk et al. (2009), (13) Mortlock et al. (2009), (14) Willott et al. (2009), (15) Willott et al. (2010b), (16) Willott et al. (2010a), (17) Zeimann et al. (2011), (18) McGreer et al. (2013), (19) Venemans et al. (2013), (20)…”
• Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, result): “…then one can reconcile several observational results, namely that analysis of the BH mass/luminosity function and clustering suggests that either many massive galaxies do not have BHs, or these BHs are less massive than expected (Willott et al. 2010; Treister et al. 2013; Weigel et al. 2015).”
• Evidence for heavy-seed origin of early supermassive black holes from a z ≈ 10 X-ray quasar (2023, unknown): “However, for light seeds continuous accretion at the Eddington limit or above for several hundred of million years is highly unlikely as noted by [14].”
• Black hole evolution – I. Supernova-regulated black hole growth (2015, background): “Willott et al. (2010), however, based on the comparison between the BH and galaxy mass functions at z ∼ 6, suggest that most high-z galaxies host BHs that are smaller than expected from this correlation at a given stellar mass (or host no BH at all).”
• SUBARU HIGH-z EXPLORATION OF LOW-LUMINOSITY QUASARS (SHELLQs). I. DISCOVERY OF 15 QUASARS AND BRIGHT GALAXIES AT 5.7 < z < 6.9 (2016, unknown): “We compute S(~p) with the quasar luminosity function of Willott et al. (2010b) and the Galactic brown dwarf model of Caballero et al. (2008).”
• THE FINAL SDSS HIGH-REDSHIFT QUASAR SAMPLE OF 52 QUASARS AT z > 5.7 (2016, methodology): “This is slightly steeper than the slopes found above from the fit to all data points, but is consistent with the value b = -2.81 reported by Willott et al. (2010b).”
• DISCOVERY OF THREE z > 6.5 QUASARS IN THE VISTA KILO-DEGREE INFRARED GALAXY (VIKING) SURVEY (2013, methodology): “…(e.g., Richards et al. 2002a; Worseck & Prochaska 2011), we decided to mimic the procedure of Willott et al. (2005) as our goal is to compare our results to the z ∼ 6 quasar luminosity function presented in Willott et al. (2010b) that was derived using the same color completeness correction.”
• THE LOW-LUMINOSITY END OF THE RADIUS–LUMINOSITY RELATIONSHIP FOR ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2013, background): “L relationship in the last few years includes investigations of MBH in the most distant quasars (e.g., Willott et al. 2010; Mortlock et al. 2011), black hole mass functions and Eddington ratio distributions through cosmic history (e.g., Greene & Ho 2007b; Vestergaard et al. 2008; Vestergaard &…”
• Faint high-redshift AGN in the Chandra deep field south: the evolution of the AGN luminosity function and black hole demography (2011, methodology): “At medium to high redshift, we used the distributions of Trakhtenbrot et al. (2011), Shemmer et al. (2004), Netzer & Trakhtenbrot (2007), and Willott et al. (2010b).”
• A JWST/NIRSpec First Census of Broad-line AGNs at z = 4–7: Detection of 10 Faint AGNs with M BH ∼ 106–108 M ⊙ and Their Host Galaxy Properties (2023, methodology): “…using 4-8 m-class telescopes including the Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (Ai-hara et al. 2018) are finding low-luminosity quasars at z ∼ 4 − 7 (e.g., Willott et al. 2010b; Kashikawa et al. 2015; Matsuoka et al. 2016; Onoue et al. 2017; Akiyama et al. 2018; Niida et al. 2020), but these…”
• Physical Properties of 15 Quasars at z ≳ 6.5 (2017, background): “6.4 (observations collected from several studies: Iwamuro et al. 2002, 2004, Barth et al. 2003, Jiang et al. 2007, Kurk et al. 2007, 2009); Willott et al. (2010b) present data for nine lower luminosity (Lbol < 10 47 erg s−1) z ∼ 6 quasars; finally, Wu et al. (2015) publish an ultra luminous quasar…”
• Black Hole Growth to z = 2 - I: Improved Virial Methods for Measuring M_BH and L/L_Edd (2012, methodology): “Thesesystems could have grown to be the most massive BHs known (MBH ∼ 1010M⊙) as early asz ∼ 4 (Willott et al. 2010; Kurk et al. 2007; De Rosa et al. 2011; Trakhtenbrot et al. 2011, hereafter T11).”
• EVIDENCE FOR NON-EVOLVING Fe ii/Mg ii RATIOS IN RAPIDLY ACCRETING z ∼ 6 QSOs (2011, methodology): “Even though the currently faintest known QSOs are included in the study we presented here (Willott et al. 2010a; Kurk et al. 2009), we are still not probing the bulk of QSOs that should be present at that redshift.”
• Accretion-driven evolution of black holes: Eddington ratios, duty cycles and active galaxy fractions (2011, background): “Many other studies of the Edding- c© 2012 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1– ?? ton ratio distributions of quasars and active galaxies have found evidence for time evolution of λc, and in some cases for mass-dependence (e.g., McLure & Dunlop 2004; Vestergaard 2004; Heckman et al. 2005; Ballo et al. 2007; Babić et ”
• How neutral is the intergalactic medium surrounding the redshift z = 7.085 quasar ULAS J1120+0641? (2011, methodology): “We now investigate this in more detail using realistic synthetic 1 The only quasar with a similarly small near zone is CFHQS J0210−0456 at z = 6.44 (Willott et al. 2010), but this object is considerably fainter and is consistent with the other z ≃ 6 quasars on accounting for its fainter…”