paper

A new approach to constraining properties of AGN host galaxies by combining image and SED decomposition: testing upon the MBH-M* relation

arXiv:2410.05857 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad9aa3

Abstract

The outshining light from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) poses significant challenges in studying the properties of AGN host galaxies. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach which combines image decomposition and spectral energy distribution (SED) decomposition to constrain properties of AGN host galaxies. Image decomposition allows us to disentangle optical flux into AGN and stellar components, thereby providing additional constraints on the SED models to derive more refined stellar mass. To test the viability of this approach, we obtained a sample of 24 X-ray selected type-I AGNs with redshifts ranging from 0.73 to 2.47. We estimated the stellar masses for our sample and found that our results are generally consistent with earlier estimates based on different methods. Through examining the posterior distribution of stellar masses, we find that our method could derive better constrained results compared to previous SED decomposition methods. With the derived stellar masses, we further studied the MBH-M* relation of our sample, finding a higher intrinsic scatter in the correlation for our entire sample compared to the local quiescent correlation, which could be caused by a few black hole monsters in our sample. We propose that based on our method, future works could extend to larger samples of high-redshift AGN host galaxies, thereby enhancing our understanding of their properties.

15 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. This work used the code https://github.com/hanyk/BayeSED3 . The readers can refer to a Jupyter notebook to reproduce our results, see https://github.com/hanyk/BayeSED3/blob/main/observation/agn_host_decomp/demo.ipynb

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