Estimating Black Hole Masses in Active Galaxies Using the Hα Emission Line
By Jenny E. Greene, Luis C. Ho. 2005
200 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It has been established that virial masses for black holes in low-redshift active galaxies can be estimated from measurements of the optical continuum strength and the width of the broad Hβ line. Under various circumstances, however, both of these quantities can be challenging to measure or can be subject to large systematic uncertainties. To mitigate these difficulties, we present a new method for estimating black hole masses. From analysis of a new sample of broad-line active galactic nuclei, we find that Hα luminosity scales almost linearly with optical continuum luminosity and that a strong correlation exists between Hα and Hβ line widths. These two empirical correlations allow us to translate the standard virial mass system to a new one based solely on observations of the broad Hα emission line.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e98dfc0b526a59397d9f6375a74a19a5f4bfc8d2
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Instrumentation
Citations in the corpus
- A Census of Photometrically Selected Little Red Dots at 4 < z < 9 in JWST Blank Fields (2024, methodology): “Supporting this, Fur-tak et al. (2023b) and Kokorev et al. (2023a) also find that black holes masses ( M BH ) derived via broad H β lines and continuum are identical, given the scatter of the relations derived from AGN reverberation mapping (see e.g. Kaspi et al. 2000; Greene & Ho 2005), hinting at ”
- The Mass Function of Active Black Holes in the Local Universe (2007, methodology): “In terms of the AGN features, the continuum luminosity and FWHMHα are determined using the formulae presented in Greene & Ho (2005b).”
- JWST CEERS and JADES Active Galaxies at z = 4–7 Violate the Local M •–M ⋆ Relation at >3σ: Implications for Low-mass Black Holes and Seeding Models (2023, background): “We chose these sources because of two critical commonalities: they are all spectroscopically confirmed with NIRSpec, and their black hole masses are estimated with the H α line (Greene & Ho 2005).”
- A New Sample of Low-Mass Black Holes in Active Galaxies (2007, methodology): “The flux density at 2500 Å,f2500, is calculated using the measuredLHα, the relation betweenLHα and L5100 from Greene & Ho (2005b), and an assumed spectral slope ofβ = −1.56 ( fλ ∝ λ−β ; Vanden Berk et al. 2001).”
- A JWST/NIRSpec First Census of Broad-line AGNs at z = 4–7: Detection of 10 Faint AGNs with M BH ∼ 106–108 M ⊙ and Their Host Galaxy Properties (2023, methodology): “The black hole mass is estimated with the following equation calibrated at z ∼ 0 in Greene & Ho (2005): where the L H α, broad is the extinction-correlated broad-line H α luminosity, and FWHM H α, broad is the FWHM of the broad H α emission line.”
- RADIATIVELY INEFFICIENT ACCRETION IN NEARBY GALAXIES (2009, background): “For sources with Eddington ratios below 0.1, and assuming that on average Hα/Hβ= 3.5 (Greene & Ho 2005), the median value ofCHα ≈ 220 with an interquartile range of 160.”
- Black Holes in Pseudobulges and Spheroidals: A Change in the Black Hole-Bulge Scaling Relations at Low Mass (2008, methodology): “In this paper we use the H calibration of Greene & Ho (2005b) and the most recent calibration of the radius-luminosity relation presented by Bentz et al. (2006).”