Description
We use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Quasar Data Release 12 (DR12Q), containing nearly 300000 active galactic nuclei (AGNs), to calculate the monochromatic luminosities at 5100, 3000, and 1350{AA}, derived from the broadband extinction-corrected SDSS magnitudes. After matching these sources to their counterparts from the SDSS Quasar Data Release 7 (DR7Q), we find very high correlations between our luminosities and DR7Q spectra-based luminosities with minute mean offsets (~0.01dex) and dispersions of differences of 0.11, 0.10, and 0.12dex, respectively, across a luminosity range of 2.5dex. We then estimate the black hole (BH) masses of the AGNs using the broad line region radius-disk luminosity relations and the FWHM of the MgII and CIV emission lines, to provide a catalog of 283033 virial BH mass estimates (132451 for MgII, 213071 for CIV, and 62489 for both) along with the estimates of the bolometric luminosity and Eddington ratio for 0.1<z<5.5 and for roughly a quarter of the sky covered by SDSS. The BH mass estimates from Mg II turned out to be closely matched to the ones from DR7Q with a dispersion of differences of 0.34dex across a BH mass range of ~2dex. We uncovered a bias in the derived CIV FWHMs from DR12Q as compared to DR7Q, which we correct empirically. The CIV BH mass estimates should be used with caution because the CIV line is known to cause problems in the estimation of BH mass from single-epoch spectra. Finally, after the FWHM correction, the AGN BH mass estimates from CIV closely match the DR7Q ones (with a dispersion of 0.28dex), and more importantly the MgII and CIV BH masses agree internally with a mean offset of 0.07dex and a dispersion of 0.39dex.
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