The Black Hole Mass-Bulge Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei from Reverberation Mapping and Hubble Space Telescope Imaging

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between black hole mass and bulge luminosity for AGNs with reverberation-based black hole mass measurements and bulge luminosities from two-dimensional decompositions of Hubble Space Telescope host galaxy images. We find that the slope of the relationship for AGNs is 0.76-0.85 with an uncertainty of ~0.1, somewhat shallower than the M_BH \propto L^{1.0+/-0.1} relationship that has been fit to nearby quiescent galaxies with dynamical black hole mass measurements. This is somewhat perplexing, as the AGN black hole masses include an overall scaling factor that brings the AGN M_BH-sigma relationship into agreement with that of quiescent galaxies. We discuss biases that may be inherent to the AGN and quiescent galaxy samples and could cause the apparent inconsistency in the forms of their M_BH-L_bulge relationships.

5 pages, 3 figures and 2 tables, submitted to ApJ Letters

References in corpus (5)

• The Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei: The Effect of Host-Galaxy Starlight on Luminosity Measurements
• The effect of radiation pressure on virial black hole mass estimates and the case of Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxies
• Black Holes in Pseudobulges and Spheroidals: A Change in the Black Hole-Bulge Scaling Relations at Low Mass
• The Origin of the Intrinsic Scatter in the Relation Between Black Hole Mass and Bulge Luminosity for Nearby Active Galaxies
• On the inconsistency between the black hole mass function inferred from M_bh-sigma and M_bh-L correlation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• A Revised Broad-Line Region Radius and Black Hole Mass for the Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 NGC 4051