Supermassive Black Hole Masses of ~500k QSOs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Measurements of supermassive black hole (SMBH) masses are crucial in studying the co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. Although reverberation mapping is the most accurate method known to date, this requires spectroscopic monitoring over long periods. Thus, the current sample barely reaches three digits. The virial method, on the other hand, uses emission-line and continuum properties from a single spectrum to estimate the SMBH mass; hence the name single-epoch method. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has observed spectra of almost all quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) discovered so far. Building on previous studies, using the single-epoch method, we estimate the SMBH masses of more than 500,000 QSOs from the SDSS DR14 Quasar Catalog. This increases the mass-estimated SMBH sample almost by a factor of two, and especially more for the low-mass regime, which was the main target of SDSS-IV (eBOSS).