Weighing supermassive black holes

We calculate the black hole masses for a sample of 27728 quasars selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 3 (DR3). To ensure a high signal-to-noise ratio, we reconstruct quasar spectra for this large sample of quasars using the eigenspectra method (Yip et al., 2004). This method reduces the uncertainty of the measurements for even noisy original spectra, making almost all the SDSS quasar spectra usable for our study.;As a second application, we have investigated a claim by Steinhardt and Elvis (2009) that there exists a sub-Eddington boundary in the quasar mass-luminosity plane using the Shen et al. (2008) mass estimates. We re-calibrate the mass-scaling relations following Wang et al. (2009) with the most up-to-date reverberation estimates of black hole masses. We compare results from the original data sets with the new re-calibrated estimates of the mass-luminosity plane. We conclude that the presence of the sub-Eddington boundary in the original data of Shen et al. (2008) is likely due to biases in the mass-scaling relation and not to any physical process.;A few applications for black hole mass estimates are presented here. Wang et al. (2006) estimated an average radiative efficiency of 30%-35% for quasars at moderate redshift, which implies that most supermassive black holes are rotating very rapidly. Using our black hole mass estimates, we have found that their method is not independent of quasar lifetimes and thus that quasars do not necessarily have such high efficiencies.