Detection Prospects of Local Super-Massive Black Holes Based on the Sloan-Digital Sky Survey

TL;DR

This paper assesses the potential for future telescopes like JWST, ELT, and VLB to detect and image local super-massive black holes, based on statistical analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasar catalog.

Contribution

It provides the first estimates of the number of super-massive black holes detectable by upcoming observational facilities within 50 Mpc.

Findings

JWST and ELT can resolve gravitational influences of ~1000 black holes within 50 Mpc.

VLB observatory could capture ~10 images of black hole silhouettes similar to M87*.

The study offers a statistical framework for future black hole detection prospects.

Abstract

We use the Sloan-Digital Sky Survey quasar catalog to statistically infer the local abundance of black holes heavier than $10^8M_\odot$, which allows us to estimate the detection prospect of super-massive black holes by future observational campaigns. We find that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) should be able to resolve, with integral field spectroscopy techniques, the gravitational influence of $\sim10^3$ black holes within a sphere of $\sim50\;\rm Mpc$. A Very-Long Baseline (VLB) observatory with one receiver placed in a geostationary orbit, is predicted to capture $\sim10$ images of the silhouette of a black hole, similar to the image of $\rm M87^*$ recently performed by the Event Horizon Telescope.