English

287,872 Supermassive Black Holes Masses: Deep Learning Approaching Reverberation Mapping Accuracy

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-12-05 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We present a population-scale catalogue of 287,872 supermassive black hole masses with high accuracy. Using a deep encoder-decoder network trained on optical spectra with reverberation-mapping (RM) based labels of 849 quasars and applied to all SDSS quasars up to z=4z=4, our method achieves a root-mean-square error of 0.0580.058\,dex, a relative uncertainty of 14%\approx 14\%, and coefficient of determination R20.91R^{2}\approx0.91 with respect to RM-based masses, far surpassing traditional single-line virial estimators. Notably, the high accuracy is maintained for both low (<107.5M<10^{7.5}\,M_\odot) and high (>109M>10^{9}\,M_\odot) mass quasars, where empirical relations are unreliable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.04803,
  title  = {287,872 Supermassive Black Holes Masses: Deep Learning Approaching Reverberation Mapping Accuracy},
  author = {Yuhao Lu and HengJian SiTu and Jie Li and Yixuan Li and Yang Liu and Wenbin Lin and Yu Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.04803},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 9 figures. Submitted to Journal of High Energy Astrophysics