Simultaneous Ultraviolet and Optical Emission-line Profiles of Quasars: Implications for Black Hole Mass Determination

TL;DR

This study compares ultraviolet and optical emission-line profiles in quasars to assess their reliability for black hole mass estimation, finding Mg II and Balmer lines consistent, while C IV shows complex behavior needing further investigation.

Contribution

It provides a simultaneous spectral analysis of multiple emission lines in quasars, evaluating their effectiveness for accurate black hole mass measurements.

Findings

Mg II and Balmer lines yield consistent black hole masses

C III] is unreliable for mass estimation due to large velocity width spread

C IV shows variable reliability, with some profiles overestimating masses

Abstract

The X-shooter instrument on the VLT was used to obtain spectra of seven moderate-redshift quasars simultaneously covering the spectral range 3000 Ang to 2.5 microns. At z ~ 1.5, most of the prominent broad emission lines in the ultraviolet to optical region are captured in their rest frame. We use this unique dataset, which mitigates complications from source variability, to intercompare the line profiles of C IV 1549, C III] 1909, Mg II 2800, and Halpha and evaluate their implications for black hole mass estimation. We confirm that Mg II and the Balmer lines share similar kinematics and that they deliver mutually consistent black hole mass estimates with minimal internal scatter (< 0.1 dex) using the latest virial mass estimators. Although no virial mass formalism has yet been calibrated for C III], this line does not appear promising for such an application because of the large spread of its velocity width compared to lines of both higher and lower ionization; part of the discrepancy may be due to the difficulty of deblending C III] from its neighboring lines. The situation for C IV is complex and, because of the limited statistics of our small sample, inconclusive. On the one hand, slightly more than half of our sample (4/7) have C IV line widths that correlate reasonably well with Halpha line widths, and their respective black hole mass estimates agree to within ~0.15 dex. The rest, on the other hand, exhibit exceptionally broad C IV profiles that overestimate virial masses by factors of 2-5 compared to Halpha. As C IV is widely used to study black hole demographics at high redshifts, we urgently need to revisit our analysis with a larger sample.