Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. III. The M-sigma relation in the last six billion years

TL;DR

This study investigates how the relationship between black hole mass and host galaxy velocity dispersion has evolved over the last six billion years, revealing significant changes inconsistent with a static universal relation.

Contribution

It provides new measurements of the M-sigma relation at three different redshifts, demonstrating evolution and challenging the notion of a non-evolving universal relation.

Findings

Distant spheroids have smaller velocity dispersions for fixed black hole mass.

Measured offset at z=0.57 indicates evolution in the M-sigma relation.

Results are inconsistent with a non-evolving universal M-sigma relation at 95% confidence.

Abstract

We measure the evolution of the correlation between black hole mass and host spheroid velocity dispersion over the last 6 billion years, by studying three carefully selected samples of active galaxies at z=0.57, z=0.36 and z<0.1. For all three samples, virial black hole masses are consistently estimated using the line dispersion of H$\beta$ and the continuum luminosity at 5100A or Halpha line luminosity, based on our cross calibration of the broad line region size-luminosity relation. For the z=0.57 sample, new stellar velocity dispersions are measured from high signal-to-noise ratio spectra obtained at the Keck Telescope, while for the two lower redshift samples they are compiled from previous works. Extending our previous result at z=0.36, we find an offset from the local relation, suggesting that for fixed M_{BH}, distant spheroids have on average smaller velocity dispersions than local ones. The measured offset at z=0.57 is d log sigma_{*}=0.12 \pm 0.05\pm 0.06 (or d log M_{BH}=0.50 \pm 0.22\pm 0.25), i.e. d log M_{BH} = (3.1\pm1.5)\log (1+z) + 0.05\pm0.21. This is inconsistent with a tight and non-evolving universal M-sigma relation at the 95%CL