New black hole mass calibrations and the fundamental plane of the broad-line region size, luminosity, and velocity

Abstract

We present a new calibration of the broad-line region (BLR) size-luminosity-velocity relation using a sample of 157 AGNs with reliable Hbeta time-delay (\lag) measurements from Wang & Woo 2024. By incorporating the Eddington ratio as a third parameter, we effectively correct the systematic offset of high-Eddington AGNs in the traditional BLR size-luminosity relation. The resulting three-parameter fit defines a fundamental plane in the 3-D space of the \lag, optical luminosity, and Hbeta velocity, with an intrinsic scatter of 0.21 dex. This tight correlation reflects the coupled effects of gas kinematics, photoionization, and BLR geometry. In turn, we develop a new method to infer \lag\ from the combination of optical luminosity and Hbeta velocity, and derive single-epoch black hole mass estimators by adopting either the full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) or line dispersion ($\sigma$) of the Hbeta line profile as the velocity indicator. The derived \lag shows a ~0.1 dex scatter, depending on the choice of calibrations. We show that the previous mass estimates based on the two-parameter size-luminosity relation with a 0.5 slope can be overestimated by up to 0.5 dex, demonstrating that the new mass estimator substantially changes the cosmic black hole mass density and the growth of black hole seeds in the early universe.

arXiv commentPublished. Equations are slightly revised in this version

References in corpus (33)

• Reverberation Measurements for 17 Quasars and the Size-Mass-Luminosity Relations in Active Galactic Nuclei
• The Low-Luminosity End of the Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei
• AGN Black Hole Masses and Bolometric Luminosities
• Linear Regression for Astronomical Data with Measurement Errors and Intrinsic Scatter
• The Assembly of the First Massive Black Holes
• The Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei: The Effect of Host-Galaxy Starlight on Luminosity Measurements II. The Full Sample of Reverberation-Mapped AGNs
• Systematic Effects in Measurement of Black Hole Masses by Emission-Line Reverberation of Active Galactic Nuclei: Eddington Ratio and Inclination
• Modeling reverberation mapping data II: dynamical modeling of the Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2008 dataset
• The black hole mass - stellar velocity dispersion relation of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies
• Supermassive Black Holes with High Accretion Rates in Active Galactic Nuclei. IV. H$\beta$ Time Lags and Implications for Super-Eddington Accretion
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: H$\alpha$ and H$\beta$ Reverberation Measurements From First-year Spectroscopy and Photometry
• Estimating Black Hole Masses in Active Galactic Nuclei Using the MgII 2800 Emission Line
• Spectral properties of quasars from Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 14: The catalog
• Analysis of optical Fe II emission in a sample of AGN spectra
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Technical Overview
• Supermassive Black Holes with High Accretion Rates in Active Galactic Nuclei. IX 10 New Observations of Reverberation Mapping and Shortened H$\beta$ Lags
• The Radius-Luminosity Relationship Depends on Optical Spectra in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Supermassive Black Holes with High Accretion Rates in Active Galactic Nuclei. V. A New Size-Luminosity Scaling Relation for the Broad-Line Region
• Do quiescent and active galaxies have different M_BH-sigma relations?
• A new cosmological distance measure using AGN
• Supermassive black holes with high accretion rates in active galactic nuclei: II. the most luminous standard candles in the Universe
• Recalibration of the virial factor and M-sigma relation for local active galaxies
• Hyper-Fit: Fitting Linear Models to Multidimensional Data with Multivariate Gaussian Uncertainties
• The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2011: Dynamical Modeling of the Broad-Line Region
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Low-Ionization Broad-Line Widths and Implications for Virial Black Hole Mass Estimation
• A New Iron Emission Template for Active Galactic Nuclei. I. Optical Template for the H$\beta$ region
• Interpretation of Departure from the Broad Line Region Scaling in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Scatter Analysis Along the Multidimensional Radius-Luminosity Relations for Reverberation-Mapped Mg II Sources
• Calibrating Mg II-based black-hole mass estimators using Low-to-High-Luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei
• On vertical variations of gas flow in protoplanetary disks and their impact on the transport of solids
• Systematically smaller single-epoch quasar black hole masses using a radius-luminosity relationship corrected for spectral bias
• What Does the Virial Coefficient of the \Hb Broad-Line Region Depend On?
• H$\beta$ line shape and radius-luminosity relation in 2.5D FRADO

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Massive black holes in the first billion years with JWST