Multiwavelength Monitoring of the Dwarf Seyfert 1 Galaxy NGC 4395. I. A Reverberation-based Measurement of the Black Hole Mass

By B. Peterson, M. Bentz, L. Desroches, A. Filippenko, Luis C. Ho, S. Kaspi, Ari Laor, D. Maoz, E. Moran, R. Pogge and 1 more. 2005

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A reverberation-mapping program on NGC 4395, the least luminous known Seyfert 1 galaxy, undertaken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope yields a measurement of the mass of the central black hole MBH = (3.6 ± 1.1) × 105 M☉. The observations consist of two visits of five orbits each, in 2004 April and July. During each of these visits, the UV continuum varied by at least 10% (rms), and only C IV λ1549 showed corresponding variations large enough to reliably determine the emission-line lag, which was measured to be of order 1 hr for both visits. The size of the C IV-emitting region is about a factor of 3 smaller than expected if the slope of the broad-line region radius-luminosity relationship is identical to that for the Hβ emission line. NGC 4395 is underluminous even for its small black hole mass; the Eddington ratio of ~1.2 × 10-3 is lower than that of any other active galactic nucleus for which a black hole mass measurement has been made by emission-line reverberation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

A New Sample of Low-Mass Black Holes in Active Galaxies (2007, background): “BH mass determinations are far less certain in the absence of dynamical constraints, but a variety of techniques yield BH massesfor each object of∼ 105 M⊙ (Filippenko & Ho 2003; Barth et al. 2004; Peterson et al. 2005).”
MODELING THE TIME VARIABILITY OF SDSS STRIPE 82 QUASARS AS A DAMPED RANDOM WALK (2010, background): “Reverberation mapping studies (e.g., Peterson et al. 2005) show that the broad emission lines respond to continuum fluctuations, therefore providing strong evidence that the variability is intrinsic to the quasars.”
Measuring the Masses of Supermassive Black Holes (2014, background): “Programs to measure the C ivλ1549 lag in a very low-luminosity AGN (Peterson et al. 2005) and a very high-luminosity AGN (Kaspi et al. 2007) have also been reported.”
THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT: BROAD-LINE REGION RADII AND BLACK HOLE MASSES FROM REVERBERATION MAPPING OF Hβ (2009, background): “To date, successful reverberation-mapping studies have been carried out for approximately 36 active galaxies (compiled by Peterson et al. 2004, 2005 with additions by Bentz et al. 2006b; Denney et al. 2006; Bentz et al. 2007; Grier et al. 2008, and Denney et al. 2009).”
The Coincidence of Nuclear Star Clusters and Active Galactic Nuclei (2008, background): “The black hole has a measured mass of 3.6 ± 1.1 × 105 M⊙ (Peterson et al. 2005), roughly one-third the mass of the NC. Graham & Driver (2007) note two elliptical/lenticular galaxies, NGC 3384 and 7457, which have measured black hole masses (Tremaine et al. 2002) and apparent nuclear star clusters.”
An expanded Mbh–σ diagram, and a new calibration of active galactic nuclei masses (2010, background): “References and notes: A – Bentz et al. (2009c), Hβ line; B – Denney et al. (2010); C – Peterson et al. (2005); D – Grier et al. (2008); E – weighted mean from Peterson et al. (2004) and Denney et al. (2010); F – Bentz et al. (2006); G – Denney et al. (2006); H – Sergeev et al. (2007); I – time-lag…”
Hubble Space Telescope STIS Spectra of Nuclear Star Clusters in Spiral Galaxies: Dependence of Age and Mass on Hubble Type (2006, background): “And we do know that some supermassive BHs (as revealed by AGN activity) exist in very late-type galaxies such as the Sd spiral NGC4395 (Filippenko & Ho 2003; Peterson et al. 2005) and the dE galaxy Pox 52 (Barth et al. 2004) that probably do not have bulges.”
STRUCTURE AND FORMATION OF ELLIPTICAL AND SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES (2008, background): “Furthermore, BHs exist even in bulgeless disks (Filippenko& Ho 2003; Barth et al. 2004; Greene & Ho 2004, 2007; Peterson et al. 2005; Greene, Barth, & Ho 2006; Shields et al. 2008; Barth, Greene, & Ho 2008; Thornton et al. 2008; see Ho 2008 for a review), but BH masses correlate very little with…”
Nuclear Activity in Nearby Galaxies (2008, background): “This limit agrees surprisingly well with the value of MBH estimated from its broad Hβ line width or X-ray variability properties (∼ 104−105 M⊙; Filippenko & Ho 2003), or from reverberation mapping (3.6×10 5 M⊙; Peterson et al. 2005).”
THE NGC 404 NUCLEUS: STAR CLUSTER AND POSSIBLE INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLE (2010, methodology): “A reverberation mapping mass of the BH in nearby Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 4395 (Peterson et al. 2005), and indirect mass measurements in other low mass Seyfert 1 galaxies (e.g. Greene & Ho 2007) provide additional evidence for the presence of IMBHs at the centers of lower mass galaxies.”
Nuclear star clusters (2009, methodology): “be 4 10(5) M using reverberation mapping as well as gas dynamical modelling (Peterson et al. 2005; den Brok et al. 2015), which, for a long time, constituted the lowest mass central black hole detection.”
Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “…indicate the presence of an AGN with a BH mass of MBH ∼ 3× 105 M estimated from the width of the broad emission lines under the assumption that the gas is virialized (Filippenko & Ho 2003; Barth et al. 2004; Moran et al. 2005; Peterson et al. 2005; Vaughan et al. 2005; Thornton et al. 2008).”
DWARF GALAXIES WITH OPTICAL SIGNATURES OF ACTIVE MASSIVE BLACK HOLES (2013, background): “There are a number of candidate “true” Type 2 AGNs (e.g., Tran 2003; Bianchi et al. 2008) that show no sign of a broadline region in direct or polarized light, and no clear signs of obscuration in X-rays.”
Fueling Low-Level AGN Activity through Stochastic Accretion of Cold Gas (2006, background): “However, there is only a marginal (∼ 1− 2σ) detection of this trend, and both the measurement errors and systematic uncertainties (e.g., Peterson et al. 2005; Barth et al. 2005; Greene & Ho 2005b) are large at low masses.”
Quantifying the coexistence of massive black holes and dense nuclear star clusters (2009, background): “We do however note that subsequent reverberation mapping estimates (Peterson et al. 2005) ), a bulge (Knapen et al. 2003) with a dust corrected magnitude of −19.13 K-mag (Graham & Worley 2008), and a BH (Seth et al. 2008, see also Shields et al. 2008).”
Reverberation Mapping of High-Luminosity Quasars: First Results (2006, methodology): “In Figure 6 we show the data as presented by Peterson et al. (2005), as well as their adopted best-fit relation (dotted line), towhichwehave added the data point for S5 0836+71.”