Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of High-Redshift Active Galactic Nuclei. I. A Metallicity-Accretion Rate Relationship

By O. Shemmer, H. Netzer, R. Maiolino, E. Oliva, S. Croom, E. Corbett, L. Di Fabrizio. 2004

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We present new near-infrared spectroscopic measurements of the Hβ region for a sample of 29 luminous high-redshift quasars. We have measured the width of Hβ in those sources and added archival Hβ width measurements to create a sample of 92 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) for which Hβ width and rest-frame UV measurements of N V λ1240 and C IV λ1549 emission lines are available. Our sample spans 6 orders of magnitude in luminosity and includes 31 radio-loud AGNs. It also includes 10 narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies and one broad absorption line quasar. We find that metallicity, indicated by the N V/C IV line ratio, is primarily correlated with accretion rate, which is a function of luminosity and Hβ line width. This may imply an intimate relation between starbursts, responsible for the metal enrichment of the nuclear gas, and AGN fueling, represented by the accretion rate. The correlation of metallicity with luminosity, or black hole (BH) mass, is weaker in contrast to recent results that were based on measurements of the width of C IV. We argue that using C IV as a proxy to Hβ in estimating MBH might be problematic and lead to spurious BH mass and accretion rate estimates in individual sources. We discuss the potential implications of our new result in the framework of the starburst-AGN connection and theories of BH growth.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b15b7d474419d59c9b0b6090f4ac3bf9c2a00cfc

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Citations in the corpus

The evolution of the broad-line region among SDSS quasars (2005, methodology): “The correlation of the BLR metallciity with the quasar luminosity has been reported by, e.g., Hamann & Ferland (1999), Warner et al. (2004), and Shemmer et al. (2004).”
Supercritical Accretion Flows around Black Holes: Two-dimensional, Radiation Pressure-dominated Disks with Photon Trapping (2005, result): “This tendency is also consistent with the observed results that the NLS1s, which is though to be near- or super-critical accretion objects, are metal rich objects (Nagao et al. 2002; Shemmer & Netzer 2002; Shemmer et al. 2004).”
Dust covering factor, silicate emission, and star formation in luminous QSOs (2007, methodology): “High redshift, high luminosity QSOs in our sample were mostly drawn from Shemmer et al. (2004) and from Netzer et al. (2004).”
Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “While this proposal might seem exotic, we know there are black holes with masses up to nearly 10M in galactic nuclei [241], so it is conceivable that SLABs could represent the high-mass tail of such a population.”
A comprehensive range of X-ray ionized-reflection models (2005, background): “…the X-ray spectra of some Seyfert galaxies appear to require high abundance of iron, for example MCG–6-30-15 (Fabian et al. 2002) and 1H 0707-49 (Boller et al. 2002), and Shemmer et al. (2004) have reported a strong correlation between metallicity and accretion rate in a sample of luminous quasars.”
What controls the C iv line profile in active galactic nuclei (2004, methodology): “A qualitatively similar result was found by Shemmer et al. (2004), where they find a significant correlation between the BLR metalicity and L/LEdd in their 2 < z < 3.5 sample, when MBH is estimated using 2 Note that here we use νLν(1549 Å) instead of νLν(1350 Å) used by Vestergaard, but the…”
Reverberation Mapping of High-Luminosity Quasars: First Results (2006, result): “The high Eddington ratio that we obtain is similar to that found for many other quasars (e.g., Shemmer et al. 2004; Baskin & Laor 2005).”
The Relationship between Luminosity and Broad-Line Region Size in Active Galactic Nuclei (2005, methodology): “…H , and on the optical AGN luminosity, single-epoch estimates for objects at redshifts zk 0:6 have had to rely either on IR observations (e.g., Shemmer et al. 2004) or on attempts to extend the optically based size-luminosity relation to UV luminosities andUVbroad emission lines (McLure&…”
MASS FUNCTIONS OF THE ACTIVE BLACK HOLES IN DISTANT QUASARS FROM THE LARGE BRIGHT QUASAR SURVEY, THE BRIGHT QUASAR SURVEY, AND THE COLOR-SELECTED SAMPLE OF THE SDSS FALL EQUATORIAL STRIPE (2009, result): “This distribution is consistent with earlier studies (e.g., Warner et al. 2003; Shemmer et al. 2004; McLure & Dunlop 2004; Vestergaard 2004; Kollmeier et al. 2006; Shen et al. 2008; Netzer & Traktenbrot 2007) and results showing that distant quasars are more actively accreting than local quasars…”
Ionised outflows in z $\sim$ 2.4 quasar host galaxies (2015, methodology): “We selected six QSOs at z ∼2.4 with large [Oiii]λ5007 equivalent widths (> 10Å in the rest frame) and bright H-band magnitude (< 16.5 mag) from the sample of Shemmer et al. (2004), Netzer et al. (2004) and Marziani et al. (2009).”
Spitzer Quasar and ULIRG Evolution Study (QUEST). II. The Spectral Energy Distributions of Palomar-Green Quasars (2007, background): “Estimates of the bolometric luminosity,Lbol, of unreddened AGNs (e.g. Shemmer et al. 2004; Marconi et al. 2004; Netzer & Trakhtenbrot 2007) are 5–10 times larger than L(5100).”
Radio-loud Narrow-Line Type 1 Quasars (2006, background): “This includes the possibility of enhanced starburst activity in these objects (e.g., Mathur 2000, Shemmer et al. 2004).”
The Hard X-Ray Spectrum as a Probe for Black Hole Growth in Radio-Quiet Active Galactic Nuclei (2008, methodology): “For the other Shemmer et al. (2004) sources used in this work, the Netzer et al. (2007) FWHM(Hβ ) measurements are consistent with those of Shemmer et al. (2004).”
Cosmic Evolution of Mass Accretion Rate and Metallicity in Active Galactic Nuclei (2006, methodology): “…in numerous papers to obtain a “single epoch” estimate of the black hole (BH) mass by combining the derived BLR size with a measure of the gas velocity obtained from emission line widths, e.g. FWHM(Hβ ) (e.g. Netzer 2003; Vestergaard 2004; Shemmer et al. 2004, hereafter S04; Baskin and Laor 2005).”
Faint high-redshift AGN in the Chandra deep field south: the evolution of the AGN luminosity function and black hole demography (2011, methodology): “At medium to high redshift, we used the distributions of Trakhtenbrot et al. (2011), Shemmer et al. (2004), Netzer & Trakhtenbrot (2007), and Willott et al. (2010b).”