Eddington-limited Accretion in z similar to 2 WISE-selected Hot, Dust-obscured Galaxies

Hot, dust-obscured galaxies, or "Hot DOGs," are a rare, dusty, hyperluminous galaxy population discovered by the WISE mission. Predominantly at redshifts 2–3, they include the most luminous known galaxies in the universe. Their high luminosities likely come from accretion onto highly obscured supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We have conducted a pilot survey to measure the SMBH masses of five $z\sim 2$ Hot DOGs via broad Hα emission lines, using Keck/MOSFIRE and Gemini/FLAMINGOS-2. We detect broad Hα emission in all five Hot DOGs. We find substantial corresponding SMBH masses for these Hot DOGs ($\sim {10}^{9}\,{M}_{\odot }$), and their derived Eddington ratios are close to unity. These $z\sim 2$ Hot DOGs are the most luminous active galactic nuclei for their BH masses, suggesting that they are accreting at the maximum rates for their BHs. A similar property is found for known $z\sim 6$ quasars. Our results are consistent with scenarios in which Hot DOGs represent a transitional, high-accretion phase between obscured and unobscured quasars. Hot DOGs may mark a special evolutionary stage before the red quasar and optical quasar phases, and they may be present at other cosmic epochs

THE MOST LUMINOUS GALAXIES DISCOVERED BY WISE

We present 20 Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)-selected galaxies with bolometric luminosities Lbol > 1014 LO;, including five with infrared luminosities LIR ≡ L(rest 8-1000 μm) > 1014 LO. These "extremely luminous infrared galaxies," or ELIRGs, were discovered using the "W1W2-dropout" selection criteria which requires marginal or non-detections at 3.4 and 4.6 μm (W1 and W2, respectively) but strong detections at 12 and 22 μm in the WISE survey. Their spectral energy distributions are dominated by emission at rest-frame 4-10 μm, suggesting that hot dust with Td ∼ 450 K is responsible for the high luminosities. These galaxies are likely powered by highly obscured active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and there is no evidence suggesting these systems are beamed or lensed. We compare this WISE-selected sample with 116 optically selected quasars that reach the same Lbol level, corresponding to the most luminous unobscured quasars in the literature. We find that the rest-frame 5.8 and 7.8 μm luminosities of the WISE-selected ELIRGs can be 30%-80% higher than that of the unobscured quasars. The existence of AGNs with Lbol > 1014 L at z > 3 suggests that these supermassive black holes are born with large mass, or have very rapid mass assembly. For black hole seed masses ∼103 MO, either sustained super-Eddington accretion is needed, or the radiative efficiency must be <15%, implying a black hole with slow spin, possibly due to chaotic accretion