The mass function of nearby black hole candidates

Understand

The mass function of super-massive black holes in our cosmic neighborhood is required to understand the statistics of their activity and consequently the origin of the ultra high energy particles.

• We determine a mass function of black hole candidates from the entire sky except for the Galactic plane.
• Using the 2MASS catalogue as a starting point, and the well established correlation between black hole mass and the bulge of old population of stars, we derive a list of nearby black hole candidates within the redshift range z < 0.025, then do a further selection based on the Hubble-type, and give this as a catalogue elsewhere.
• The final list of black hole candidates above a mass of M_BH > 3*10^{6} M_sol has 5,829 entries; moreover doing a further Hubble type correction to account for the selection effects cuts down the number to 2,919 black hole candidates.