CIV Emission Line Properties and Systematic Trends in Quasar Black Hole Mass Estimates

TL;DR

This study investigates how CIV emission line blueshifts in quasars affect black hole mass estimates, revealing that large blueshifts lead to overestimations and are linked to high accretion rates.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that CIV blueshifts correlate with non-virial motions, impacting black hole mass calculations and highlighting the need for correction methods.

Findings

CIV blueshifts correlate with increased line widths.

Black hole masses can be overestimated by a factor of five at large blueshifts.

High blueshift quasars have higher Eddington ratios.

Abstract

Black-hole masses are crucial to understanding the physics of the connection between quasars and their host galaxies and measuring cosmic black hole-growth. At high redshift, z > 2.1, black hole masses are normally derived using the velocity-width of the CIV broad emission line, based on the assumption that the observed velocity-widths arise from virial-induced motions. In many quasars, the CIV-emission line exhibits significant blue asymmetries (`blueshifts') with the line centroid displaced by up to thousands of km/s to the blue. These blueshifts almost certainly signal the presence of strong outflows, most likely originating in a disc wind. We have obtained near-infrared spectra, including the H$\alpha$ emission line, for 19 luminous ($L_{Bol}$ = 46.5-47.5 erg/s) Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars, at redshifts 2 < z < 2.7, with CIV emission lines spanning the full-range of blueshifts present in the population. A strong correlation between CIV-velocity width and blueshift is found and, at large blueshifts, > 2000 km/s, the velocity-widths appear to be dominated by non-virial motions. Black-hole masses, based on the full width at half maximum of the CIV-emission line, can be overestimated by a factor of five at large blueshifts. A larger sample of quasar spectra with both CIV and H$\beta$, or H$\alpha$, emission lines will allow quantitative corrections to CIV-based black-hole masses as a function of blueshift to be derived. We find that quasars with large CIV blueshifts possess high Eddington luminosity ratios and that the fraction of high-blueshift quasars in a flux-limited sample is enhanced by a factor of approximately four relative to a sample limited by black hole mass.