Supermassive black holes in the early universe

Abstract

Abstract. We analyzed spectra of 15 luminous high-redshift quasars (3.3 < z < 5.1) and we derived black hole masses that are based on Hβ, MgII, and CIV emission lines, in the range of 2×10 8 < M bh < 4×10 10 M . Assuming exponential growth of the black holes we estimated that it takes about several 100 Myr up to 1 Gyr to accumulate the observed black hole masses, i.e., most of the SMBHs that power these quasars at high-redshifts, started to grow at z 5 to 10.