SHELLQs. Black Hole Mass and Eddington Ratio Distributions of Intermediate-Luminosity Quasars at 6<z<7

arXiv:2609.09266 · astro-ph.GA · Submitted 2026-09-08 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.GA

Submitted: 2026-09-08

Updated: 2026-09-08

Comments: 36 pages, 16 figures, submitted to ApJ

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We present near-infrared spectroscopy of 21 quasars at 6.07 < z < 6.90 obtained with JWST/NIRSpec and Subaru/MOIRCS.

Terminology

Abstract

We present near-infrared spectroscopy of 21 quasars at 6.07 < z < 6.90 obtained with JWST/NIRSpec and Subaru/MOIRCS. These targets have absolute ultraviolet magnitudes of-25 < M 1450 < -22 and are drawn from a sample of z>6 quasars identified in the Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs) project. These quasars occupy the intermediate-luminosity regime between luminous quasars and the faint high-redshift AGNs uncovered by JWST. We detect broad Balmer emission lines and MgII 2798 with underlying continua from the NIRSpec and MOIRCS targets, respectively. The virial black hole masses of this sample span a wide range of 7.2 < log M BH/M sun < 9.4, with Eddington ratios of-1.3 < log L bol/L Edd < 0.4. Combining these measurements with our previous mass estimates for other SHELLQs quasars, we construct a sample of 27 quasars with M BH estimates at 6 < z < 7 and derive the distributions of M BH and L bol/L Edd. When compared with luminosity-matched quasars at z 1.3, we find median offsets of delta log M BH/M sun = -0.4 and Delta log L bol/L Edd = 0.2 in the high-redshift sample. In addition, 11% of the high-redshift quasars are accreting near or above the Eddington limit. As a systematic check, adopting the Eddington-ratio-dependent calibration of single-epoch M BH estimates increases the inferred super-Eddington fraction to 22%. These results indicate that a representative population of distant supermassive black holes undergo a rapid accretion phase, although not as extreme as that seen in the most luminous quasar population, consistent with the anti-hierarchical growth scenario of supermassive black holes.

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