The Fundamental Plane of the Broad-line Region in Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

Broad emission lines in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) mainly arise from gas photoionized by continuum radiation from an accretion disk around a central black hole. The shape of the broad-line profile, described by ${\mathcal{D}}_{{}_{\mathrm{H}\beta }}=\mathrm{FWHM}/{\sigma }_{{}_{\mathrm{H}\beta }}$, the ratio of full width at half maximum to the dispersion of broad H$\beta$, reflects the dynamics of the broad-line region (BLR) and correlates with the dimensionless accretion rate ($\dot{\mathcal{M}}$) or Eddington ratio ($L_{\mathrm{bol}}/L_{\mathrm{Edd}}$). At the same time, $\dot{\mathcal{M}}$ and $L_{\mathrm{bol}}/L_{\mathrm{Edd}}$ correlate with ${\mathcal{R}}_{\mathrm{Fe}}$, the ratio of optical Fe II to H$\beta$ line flux emission. Assembling all AGNs with reverberation mapping measurements of broad H$\beta$, both from the literature and from new observations reported here, we find a strong bivariate correlation of the form $\log (\dot{\mathcal{M}},L_{\mathrm{bol}}/L_{\mathrm{Edd}})=\alpha +\beta {\mathcal{D}}_{{}_{\mathrm{H}\beta }}+\gamma {\mathcal{R}}_{\mathrm{Fe}},$ where $\alpha =(2.47,0.31)$, $\beta =-(1.59,0.82)$ and $\gamma =(1.34,0.80)$. We refer to this as the fundamental plane of the BLR. We apply the plane to a sample of $z<0.8$ quasars to demonstrate the prevalence of super-Eddington accreting AGNs are quite common at low redshifts.

arXiv comment5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

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