Related papers: The Eddington Luminosity Phase in Quasars: Duratio…

We use 62185 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 sample to explore the relationship between black hole mass and luminosity. Black hole masses were estimated based on the widths of their H{\beta}, MgII and CIV lines and…

Observations of $z \gtrsim 6$ quasars provide information on the early evolution of the most massive black holes (MBHs) and galaxies. Current observations, able to trace both gas and stellar properties, reveal a population of MBHs that is…

Growth of massive black holes (MBHs) in galactic centers comes mainly from gas accretion during their QSO/AGN phases. In this paper we apply an extended Soltan argument, connecting the local MBH mass function with the time-integral of the…

In a previous paper, Collin & Hur\'e (2001), using a sample of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) where the mass has been determined by reverberation studies (Kaspi et al. 2000), have shown that if the optical luminosity is emitted by a steady…

Quasars (QSOs) emit an enormous amount of light as a result of the accretion of gas onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Thanks to their luminosity, the most distant known QSOs allow us to trace the growth of SMBHs deep into the epoch of…

The early evolution of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) and black hole mass function (BHMF) encodes key information on the physics determining the radiative and accretion processes of supermassive black holes (BHs) in high-$z$ quasars.…

One of the most pressing questions in cosmology is how the black holes (BHs) powering quasars at high redshift grow to supermassive scales within a billion years of the Big Bang. Here we show that sustained super-Eddington accretion can be…

Although the population of luminous quasars rises and falls over a period of 10^9 years, the typical lifetime of individual quasars is uncertain by several orders of magnitude. We show that quasar clustering measurements can substantially…

Virial black-hole mass estimates are presented for 12698 quasars in the redshift interval 0.1<z<2.1, based on modelling of spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) first data release. The black-hole masses of the SDSS quasars are…

Connection between the quasar luminosity function and galaxy mass function is investigated in the framework of a phenomenological approach which relates AGN formation to galaxy mergers. Quasars are assumed to be short-lived, the luminosity…

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-IR spectroscopy of nine CFHQS quasars at z~6 to determine black hole masses. These are compared with…

Dust-obscured quasars have been suspected as the intermediate stage galaxies between merger-driven star-forming galaxies and unobscured quasars. This merger-driven galaxy evolution scenario suggests that dust-obscured quasars exhibit higher…

Wang et al. (2006) estimated an average radiative efficiency of 30% -- 35% for quasars at moderate redshift. We find that their method is not independent of quasar lifetimes and thus that quasars do not necessarily have such high…

We use the spectra of 22,000 nearby early-type galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to determine the age distribution of these galaxies as a function of their velocity dispersion sigma_v in the range 100 km/s < sigma_v < 280…

With the recent discoveries of massive and highly luminous quasars at high redshifts ($z\sim7$; e.g. Mortlock et al. 2011), the question of how black holes (BHs) grow in the early Universe has been cast in a new light. In order to grow BHs…

We employ a flexible Bayesian technique to estimate the black hole mass and Eddington ratio functions for Type 1 (i.e., broad line) quasars from a uniformly-selected data set of ~58,000 quasars from the SDSS DR7. We find that the SDSS…

We present the results of our recent Hubble Space Telescope imaging study, in which we have successfully deconvolved host and nuclear flux for the some of the most luminous quasars in the Universe. Host morphologies have been recovered for…

We provide a simple theoretical model for the quasar luminosity function at high redshifts that naturally reproduces the statistical properties of the luminous SDSS quasar sample at redshifts z~4.3 and z>5.7. Our model is based on the…

Exceptionally bright quasars with redshifts up to z=6.28 have recently been discovered. Quasars are thought to be powered by the accretion of gas onto supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. Their maximum (Eddington) luminosity…

Type 2 quasars are an important constituent of active galaxies, possibly representing the evolutionary precursors of traditionally studied type 1 quasars. We characterize the black hole mass ($M_{\rm BH}$) and Eddington ratio ($L_{\rm…