The Black Hole Mass-Bulge Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei from Reverberation Mapping and Hubble Space Telescope Imaging

TL;DR

This study examines the correlation between black hole mass and bulge luminosity in active galactic nuclei, revealing a shallower relationship than in quiescent galaxies and discussing potential biases affecting these findings.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of black hole mass-bulge luminosity relationships in AGNs using reverberation mapping and HST imaging, highlighting discrepancies with quiescent galaxies.

Findings

AGN M_BH-L_bulge slope is 0.76-0.85, shallower than 1.0 in quiescent galaxies.

The study discusses biases that may cause differences in the relationships.

Black hole mass scaling factors align AGN and quiescent galaxy M_BH-sigma relationships.

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between black hole mass and bulge luminosity for AGNs with reverberation-based black hole mass measurements and bulge luminosities from two-dimensional decompositions of Hubble Space Telescope host galaxy images. We find that the slope of the relationship for AGNs is 0.76-0.85 with an uncertainty of ~0.1, somewhat shallower than the M_BH \propto L^{1.0+/-0.1} relationship that has been fit to nearby quiescent galaxies with dynamical black hole mass measurements. This is somewhat perplexing, as the AGN black hole masses include an overall scaling factor that brings the AGN M_BH-sigma relationship into agreement with that of quiescent galaxies. We discuss biases that may be inherent to the AGN and quiescent galaxy samples and could cause the apparent inconsistency in the forms of their M_BH-L_bulge relationships.