A Reverberation-based Mass for the Central Black Hole in NGC 4151

By M. Bentz, K. Denney, E. Cackett, M. Dietrich, J. Fogel, H. Ghosh, K. Horne, C. Kuehn, T. Minezaki, C. Onken and 8 more. 2006

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have undertaken a new ground-based monitoring campaign to improve the estimates of the mass of the central black hole in NGC 4151. We measure the lag time of the broad Hβ line response compared to the optical continuum at 5100 Å and find a lag of 6.6 days. We combine our data with the recent reanalysis of UV emission lines by Metzroth and coworkers to calculate a weighted mean of the black hole mass, MBH = (4.57) × 107 M☉. The absolute calibration of the black hole mass is based on normalization of the AGN black hole mass-stellar velocity dispersion (MBH-σ*) relationship to that of quiescent galaxies by Onken and coworkers. The scatter in the MBH-σ* relationship suggests that reverberation-mapping-based mass measurements are typically uncertain by a factor of 3-4.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f24ec8f95e73310f26ae91edad2b9fd9e06da18c

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Citations in the corpus

The Effect of Radiation Pressure on Virial Black Hole Mass Estimates and the Case of Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies (2008, methodology): “The radiusluminosity relation discovered by Kaspi et al. (2000) shows that continuum luminosity can be used as a proxy forRBLR (Kaspi et al. 2000, 2005; Bentz et al. 2006b).”
Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. II. Scaling Relations at z = 0.36 (2007, methodology): “…by TREU ET AL.122 Vol. 667 combining the most recent calibrations of the size-luminosity relation and virial coefficients (Onken et al. 2004; Bentz et al. 2006b): logMBH ¼ 8:58þ 2 log H 3000 km s 1 þ 0:518 log L5100 1044 ergs 1 ; ð1Þ where H is the second moment of the broad H line profile.”
THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT: BROAD-LINE REGION RADII AND BLACK HOLE MASSES FROM REVERBERATION MAPPING OF Hβ (2009, methodology): “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).”
Relativistic iron K X-ray reverberation in NGC 4151 (2011, methodology): “The mass of NGC 4151 is determined accurately with Hβ reverberation mapping to be M = 4.5 ± 0.5 × 107 M⊙ (Bentz et al. 2006).”
Measuring the Masses of Supermassive Black Holes (2014, background): “…a consortium of astronomers primarily in eastern Europe, Mexico, and Germany (e.g., Shapovalova et al. 2010; Popović et al. 2011; Shapovalova et al. 2012) and by the author’s group of collaborators (Bentz et al. 2006b; Denney et al. 2006; Bentz et al. 2007; Denney et al. 2010; Grier et al. 2012b).”
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 u”
Determining Inclinations of Active Galactic Nuclei Via Their Narrow-Line Region Kinematics (2012, background): “…using reverberation mapping, where BLR size, estimated from the time lag between corresponding ionizing continuum and broad line emission fluxes, and broad-line velocities are combined to calculate the AGN black hole mass (Peterson et al. 2004; Bentz et al. 2006; Denney et al. 2009, 2010).”
AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO MEASURING REVERBERATION LAGS IN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, methodology): “Second, reverberation studies have established a tight empirical relationship between the BLR size and the AGN continuum luminosity (Kaspi et al. 1996; Kaspi et al. 2000, 2005; Bentz et al. 2006, 2009) that allows us to use the luminosity as a surrogate for the BLR size in eq.”
Comparing and Calibrating Black Hole Mass Estimators for Distant Active Galactic Nuclei (2007, methodology): “In particular, following the results of the study by Bentz et al. (2006) we adopt 0.518 as the slope of the broad-line region size vs nuclear luminosity relation, while for the size vs total luminosity (i.e. including host galaxy contamination within the spectroscopic aperture) relation we adopt…”
THE LOW-LUMINOSITY END OF THE RADIUS–LUMINOSITY RELATIONSHIP FOR ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2013, methodology): “Based on previous work (Kaspi et al. 2000, 2005; Bentz et al. 2006b, 2009a), we expect the form of the RBLR–”
The black hole mass–stellar velocity dispersion correlation: bulges versus pseudo-bulges (2008, result): “…hole massMbh = 3+1−2×107 M is a mean value of the measurement using stellar kinematics (∼4×107 M , Onken et al. 2007) and gas kinematics (3.2+0.8−2.3 × 107 M [corrected for distance], Hicks & Malkan 2008), which is consistent with the RM measurement (4.57+0.57−0.47 × 107 M , Bentz et al. 2006).”
Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. III. The MBH-σ* Relation in the Last Six Billion Years (2008, methodology): “First, the reverberation sample is small in size and shows a flattened distribution on the MBH-σ∗ plane, especially with a new reverberation black hole mass of NGC 4151 (Bentz et al. 2006b; see magenta points in Figure 2).”
REVERBERATION MEASUREMENTS OF THE INNER RADIUS OF THE DUST TORUS IN 17 SEYFERT GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “We enlarged the data for reverberation radii of the BLR by adding the results of the recent reverberation observations for Hβ emission lines (Bentz et al. 2006b, 2007, 2009a,b; Denney et al. 2010; Barth et al. 2011a,b; Grier et al. 2012b).”