Events in Physics

Do all quasars have the same Black Hole Mass?

I shall describe the new ESO VST ATLAS imaging survey aimed at covering ~5000deg^2 of the Southern Sky to SDSS depths in ugriz. The survey has exploited the excellent imaging quality of the 2.6-m
VST telescope on its Paranal site with subarcsecond median seeing in griz and 1arcsec seeing in u. The survey is nearing completion and will soon be available for a wide variety of extragalactic and Galactic astronomy projects. I describe the science highlights so far, focussing on a redshift survey of 10000 faint quasars where we can measure their clustering out to z~2. We estimate quasar halo masses from the clustering and find that quasar halo mass has little dependence on luminosity.
We discuss whether this means that quasar black hole mass is independent of luminosity.