Toward Precision Measurement of Central Black Hole Masses

Abstract

We review briefly direct and indirect methods of measuring the masses of black holes in galactic nuclei, and then focus attention on supermassive black holes in active nuclei, with special attention to results from reverberation mapping and their limitations. We find that the intrinsic scatter in the relationship between the AGN luminosity and the broad-line region size is very small, ~0.11 dex, comparable to the uncertainties in the better reverberation measurements. We also find that the relationship between reverberation-based black hole masses and host-galaxy bulge luminosities also seems to have surprisingly little intrinsic scatter, ~0.17 dex. We note, however, that there are still potential systematics that could affect the overall mass calibration at the level of a factor of a few.

10 pages, 2 figures. To be published in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 267 "Co-Evolution of Central Black Holes and Galaxies"

References in corpus (13)

• The M-sigma and M-L Relations in Galactic Bulges and Determinations of their Intrinsic Scatter
• Biases in Virial Black Hole Masses: An SDSS Perspective
• The Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei: The Effect of Host-Galaxy Starlight on Luminosity Measurements
• The Black Hole Mass, Stellar M/L, and Dark Halo in M87
• The effect of radiation pressure on virial black hole mass estimates and the case of Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxies
• The Star-Forming Torus and Stellar Dynamical Black Hole Mass in the Seyfert 1 Nucleus of NGC3227
• A Reverberation-Based Mass for the Central Black Hole in NGC 4151
• The Black Hole Mass-Bulge Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei from Reverberation Mapping and Hubble Space Telescope Imaging
• Circumnuclear Gas in Seyfert 1 Galaxies: Morphology, Kinematics, and Direct Measurement of Black Hole Masses
• Orientation dependency of broad-line widths in quasars and consequences for black-hole mass estimation
• The Black Hole Mass of NGC 4151: Comparison of Reverberation Mapping and Stellar Dynamical Measurements
• On the observed distributions of black hole masses and Eddington ratios from radiation pressure corrected virial indicators
• An Improved Method for Using MgII to Estimate Black Hole Masses in Active Galactic Nuclei

Cited by in corpus (6)

• What Drives the Growth of Black Holes?
• The Formation and Evolution of Massive Black Holes
• GA-NIFS: Black hole and host galaxy properties of two z$\simeq$6.8 quasars from the NIRSpec IFU
• Robotic Reverberation Mapping of the Southern Seyfert NGC 3783
• GA-NIFS and EIGER: A merging quasar host at z=7 with an overmassive black hole
• Distance Probes of Dark Energy