Active Galactic Nucleus Black Hole Masses and Bolometric Luminosities

By J. Woo, C. Urry. 2002

675 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Black hole mass, along with mass accretion rate, is a fundamental property of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Black hole mass sets an approximate upper limit to AGN energetics via the Eddington limit. We collect and compare all AGN black hole mass estimates from the literature; these 177 masses are mostly based on the virial assumption for the broad emission lines, with the broad-line region size determined from either reverberation mapping or optical luminosity. We introduce 200 additional black hole mass estimates based on properties of the host galaxy bulges, using either the observed stellar velocity dispersion or the fundamental plane relation to infer σ; these methods assume that AGN hosts are normal galaxies. We compare 36 cases for which black hole mass has been generated by different methods and find, for individual objects, a scatter as high as a couple of orders of magnitude. The less direct the method, the larger the discrepancy with other estimates, probably due to the large scatter in the underlying correlations assumed. Using published fluxes, we calculate bolometric luminosities for 234 AGNs and investigate the relation between black hole mass and luminosity. In contrast to other studies, we find no significant correlation of black hole mass with luminosity, other than those induced by circular reasoning in the estimation of black hole mass. The Eddington limit defines an approximate upper envelope to the distribution of luminosities, but the lower envelope depends entirely on the sample of AGNs included. For any given black hole mass, there is a range in Eddington ratio of up to 3 orders of magnitude.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fe0cd7729d9a7f7db8ae4f8689d6b5440d3cec5

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Citations in the corpus

Biases in Virial Black Hole Masses: An SDSS Perspective (2007, background): “11) bounded byLbol = 0.01LEdd and Lbol = LEdd, consistent with recent findings (e.g., Woo & Urry 2002; Kollmeier et al. 2006).”
Determining Inclinations of Active Galactic Nuclei Via Their Narrow-Line Region Kinematics (2012, methodology): “Bolometric luminosities were obtained by integrating across all available spectral energy distribution (SED) flux points (Woo & Urry 2002) or derived from [O III] (log(LBol) ≈ log(L[OIII])+ log(3500); Heckman et al. 2004, 2005; Meléndez et al. 2008) or 2-10 keV X-ray (Malaguti et al. 1998)…”
COMPARING SINGLE-EPOCH VIRIAL BLACK HOLE MASS ESTIMATORS FOR LUMINOUS QUASARS (2012, methodology): “…technique, is much less expensive than RM, and hence has been applied in numerous studies to estimate quasar/AGN BH masses, notably for large statistical samples (e.g., Woo & Urry 2002; McLure & Dunlop 2004; Kollmeier et al. 2006; Greene & Ho 2007; Vestergaard et al. 2008; Shen et al. 2008, 2011).”
Combined long and short timescale X-ray variability of NGC 4051 with RXTE and XMM-Newton (2003, background): “Apart from the NLS1s, most other Seyfert galaxies radiate at less than 10% of their Eddington luminosity (eg Woo and Urry, 2002) and so might therefore be analogues of low state GBHs.”
Magnetic field strength and spectral distribution of six parsec-scale active galactic nuclei jets (2009, neutral): “◦9 and a black hole mass of 1.7 × 108 M (Woo & Urry 2002), the equipartition distance for a black-hole-launched jet in 2200+420 is ∼0.03 pc while Req ∼ 0.2 pc for a jet launched from the accretion disc, which according to our results, would be accessible with VLBI observations at frequencies…”
THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT: THE MBH–σ* RELATION FOR REVERBERATION-MAPPED ACTIVE GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “Since the reverberationmapped AGN sample is the “gold standard” used to calibrate all single-epoch mass estimates (e.g., Woo & Urry 2002; Vestergaard et al. 2002; McLure & Jarvis 2002; Vestergaard & Peterson 2006; McGill et al. 2008; Shen et al. 2008), this comparison is effectively a crucial link…”
On the X-ray, optical emission line and black hole mass properties of local Seyfert galaxies ! (2006, background): “No correlation is found between nuclear luminosity and MBH in agreement with some previous studies (Woo & Urry 2002; Pellegrini et al. 2005).”
Black Hole Masses and Eddington Ratios at 0.3 < z < 4 (2005, background): “As pointed out by Woo & Urry (2002), if the dependence of black hole mass on luminosity is nearly linear and there is a simple relationship between the continuum and bolometric luminosities, then a strong correlation of increasing MBH with increasing Lbol will be automatically introduced.”
A Fundamental plane of black hole activity (2003, methodology): “In practice, we want to avoid any indirect method for black hole mass estimation that relies on e.g. thecontinuum optical/UV luminosity (as done by Woo & Urry, 2002, for example).”
Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research (2004, background): “, several studies have employed the optical relations (e.g. Bian & Zhao 2003; Shields et al. 2003; Netzer 2003; Woo & Urry 2002a&b; Oshlack et al. 2002; Wandel 2002; Boroson 2002; McLure & Dunlop 2001).”
Active Galactic Nuclei in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. II. Emission-Line Luminosity Function (2005, methodology): “For example, Woo & Urry (2002) compiled a sample of 377 AGNswith known black hole masses and calculated bolometric luminosities for 234 among them.”
The non-linear dependence of flux on black hole mass and accretion rate in core-dominated jets (2003, background): “However, other authors have found no such evidence (Ho 2002; Woo & Urry 2002).”
First X-ray-based statistical tests for clumpy-torus models: eclipse events from 230 years of monitoring of Seyfert AGN (2014, background): “For NGC 1052 (MBH = 10 8.19M⊙; Woo & Urry 2002), a 4.56-year transit would place it > 20 pc from the black hole.”
A Unified, Merger-driven Model of the Origin of Starbursts, Quasars, the Cosmic X-Ray Background, Supermassive Black Holes, and Galaxy Spheroids (2005, background): “This observation, however, has caused considerable confusion and debate, as numerous observations of both radio-quiet (Woo & Urry 2002) and radio-loud (O’Dowd et al. 2002) local (low redshift) AGN have found that nuclear and host luminosities are uncorrelated, implying that nuclear luminosity does…”
Fueling Low-Level AGN Activity through Stochastic Accretion of Cold Gas (2006, background): “This has been seen in observations of local AGN and quasars and their host galaxies (e.g., Bahcall et al. 1997; McLure et al. 1999; Hamilton et al. 2002; Woo & Urry 2002; O’Dowd et al. 2002; Jahnke & Wisotzki 2003; Hao et al. 2005; Vanden Berk et al. 2005).”