Polarization in lines - a new method for measuring black hole masses in active galaxies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel spectropolarimetric technique for estimating supermassive black hole masses in active galaxies, providing consistent measurements across different cosmic times and aligning well with existing reverberation methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new polarization-based method for SMBH mass measurement that is consistent and applicable across various cosmological epochs.

Findings

The method yields SMBH mass estimates in good agreement with reverberation measurements.

Spectropolarimetric observations of 9 AGNs validate the effectiveness of the new technique.

The approach allows for consistent SMBH mass measurements at different redshifts.

Abstract

Measuring of the masses of galactic supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is an important task, since they correlate with the host galaxy properties and play an important role in evolution of galaxies. Here we present a new method for measuring of SMBH masses using the polarization of the broad lines emitted from active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We performed spectropolarometric observations of 9 AGNs and find that this method gives measured masses which are in a good agreement with reverberation measurements. An advantage of this method is that it can be used to measure the masses of SMBHs in a consistent way at different cosmological epochs.