Black Hole Mass Estimates from Reverberation Mapping and from Spatially Resolved Kinematics

By Karl Gebhardt, J. Kormendy, Luis C. Ho, R. Bender, G. Bower, A. Dressler, S. Faber, A. Filippenko, R. Green, C. Grillmair and 5 more. 2000

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Black hole (BH) masses that have been measured by reverberation mapping in active galaxies fall significantly below the correlation between bulge luminosity and BH mass determined from spatially resolved kinematics of nearby normal galaxies. This discrepancy has created concern that one or both techniques suffer from systematic errors. We show that BH masses from reverberation mapping are consistent with the recently discovered relationship between BH mass and galaxy velocity dispersion. Therefore, the bulge luminosities are the probable source of the disagreement, not problems with either method of mass measurement. This result underscores the utility of the BH mass-velocity dispersion relationship. Reverberation mapping can now be applied with increased confidence to galaxies whose active nuclei are too bright or whose distances are too large for BH searches based on spatially resolved kinematics.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/903eae4a2dccd0d1615b639a3524e2987ec9451e

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Citations in the corpus

The abundance and clustering of dark haloes in the standard ΛCDM cosmogony (2002, background): “Such galaxies are indeed now thought to host the ∼ 109 M⊙ black holes which must have powered these distant quasars (Gebhardt et al 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000).”
On the Relationship between Radio Emission and Black Hole Mass in Galactic Nuclei (2001, background): “3 dex on average (Gebhardt et al. 2000a), but the few that are still based on two-integral models may undergo more signiÐcant revisions in the future.”
ESTIMATING BLACK HOLE MASSES IN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI USING THE Mg ii λ2800 EMISSION LINE (2009, methodology): “And third, the BH masses estimated by RM are roughly consistent (Gebhardt et al. 2000b; Ferrarese et al. 2001; Nelson et al. 2004; Onken et al. 2004) with the predictions from the tight correlation between MBH and bulge stellar velocity dispersion established for inactive galaxies (the MBH– σ…”
Enhanced star formation rates in AGN hosts with respect to inactive galaxies from PEP-Herschel observations (2012, background): “…correlations are known to exist between SMBH mass and galaxy bulge properties (stellar mass, velocity dispersion, etc.) in the local Universe (e.g. Gebhardt et al. 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Kormendy & Bender 2009; Gültekin et al. 2009; Graham et al. 2011) and are also…”
RELATIONS BETWEEN CENTRAL BLACK HOLE MASS AND TOTAL GALAXY STELLAR MASS IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2015, methodology): “…host galaxies, primarily of the bulge component (e.g., bulge mass, velocity dispersion, infrared luminosity, see for instance Magorrian et al. 1998; Gebhardt et al. 2000a; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Häring & Rix 2004; Gültekin et al. 2009; Beifiori et al. 2012; Kormendy & Ho…”
The Mass Function of Active Black Holes in the Local Universe (2007, methodology): “…holes (BHs) and galaxies are coordinated such that, in local spheroids, BH mass is strongly correlated with spheroid luminosity (Marconi & Hunt 2003) and stellar velocity dispersion (theMBH −σ∗ relation; Gebhardt et al. 2000a; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002; Barth et al. 2005).”
Selection Bias in Observing the Cosmological Evolution of the M•-σ and M•-L Relationships (2007, methodology): “…or stellar velocity dispersion (Dressler 1989; Kormendy 1993; Kormendy & Richstone 1995; Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000a; Tremaine et al. 2002; Häring & Rix 2004), suggests that the formation and growth of central black holes is deeply intertwined…”
Intergalactic Magnetic Fields from Quasar Outflows (2001, background): “Under the assumption that the central black hole of a galaxy contains a fixed fraction of its total baryonic mass (Magorrian et al. 1998; Gebhardt et al. 2000), we express the black hole mass as a fixed fraction of the total galaxy mass MBH = ǫhMh, where ǫh ≈ (MBH/Mbulge) × (Ωb/Ω0) ≈ 4 × 10−4,…”
Central Masses and Broad-Line Region Sizes of Active Galactic Nuclei. II. A Homogeneous Analysis of a Large Reverberation-Mapping Database (2004, background): “Reverberation, of course, is not the only method of measuring black hole masses that can fail catastrophically under certain conditions: both stellar dynamical and gas dynamical methods can also lead to ambiguous or even misleading results (e.g., Verdoes Kleijn et al. 2000; Cappelari et al. 2003; Va”
Galaxy Luminosity Functions to z~1 from DEEP2 and COMBO-17: Implications for Red Galaxy Formation (2005, background): “The masses of present-day black holes correlate closely with the properties of their parent spheroids, whether with total luminosity (Kormendy & Richstone 1995, Häring & Rix 2004) or with velocity dispersion (Gebhardt et al. 2000, Ferrarese & Merritt 2000).”
DWARF GALAXIES WITH OPTICAL SIGNATURES OF ACTIVE MASSIVE BLACK HOLES (2013, methodology): “The growth of supermassive BHs appears to be linked to the evolution of their hosts, with more massive galaxies generally harboring more massive BHs (e.g., Gebhardt et al. 2000a; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Gültekin et al. 2009; McConnell & Ma 2013).”
Black Hole Mass, Velocity Dispersion, and the Radio Source in Active Galactic Nuclei (2000, methodology): “The long solid line is the relation determined by Gebhardt et al. (2000a) and the shorter dashed line is our fit to 3 the AGN, using the ordinary least-squares bisector (Isobe et al. 1990) which gives good results for large uncertainties in both variables.”
THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT: THE MBH–σ* RELATION FOR REVERBERATION-MAPPED ACTIVE GALAXIES (2010, background): “Remarkably, the mass of the central black hole (MBH) correlates with the global properties of their host spheroids, primarily the stellar velocity dispersion (σ∗; Ferrarese et al. 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000a).”
X-ray reverberation around accreting black holes (2014, background): “…luminosity and broad line region radius, which can be used to estimate black hole mass when combined with optical line width (e.g. Kaspi et al. 2000; Grier et al. 2012), or the correlation between black hole mass and host galaxy bulge stellar velocity dispersion (e.g. Gebhardt et al. 2000).”