The Quasar Mass-Luminosity Plane III: Smaller Errors on Virial Mass Estimates

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large SDSS quasar sample to refine virial mass estimates, reducing uncertainties and improving agreement between different emission line-based mass measurements, especially for high-Eddington-ratio quasars.

Contribution

It provides smaller, more accurate statistical uncertainties for virial mass estimates and compares different correction methods, favoring a smaller multiplicative correction.

Findings

Maximum MgII mass uncertainty is 0.15 dex.

Hβ mass uncertainty averages 0.21 dex.

A correction factor of 1.19 yields better agreement for bright quasars.

Abstract

We use 62185 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR5 sample to explore the quasar mass-luminosity plane view of virial mass estimation. Previous work shows deviations of ~0.4 dex between virial and reverberation masses. The decline in quasar number density for the highest Eddington ratio quasars at each redshift provides an upper bound of between 0.13 and 0.29 dex for virial mass estimate statistical uncertainties. Across different redshift bins, the maximum possible MgII mass uncertainties average 0.15 dex, while H{\beta} uncertainties average 0.21 dex and CIV uncertainties average 0.27 dex. Any physical spread near the high-Eddington-ratio boundary will produce a more restrictive bound. A comparison of the sub-Eddington boundary slope using H{\beta} and MgII masses finds better agreement with uncorrected MgII masses than with recently proposed corrections. The best agreement for these bright objects is produced by a multiplicative correction by a factor of 1.19, smaller than the factor of 1.8 previously reported as producing the best agreement for the entire SDSS sample.