The black hole masses of extremely luminous radio-WISE selected galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates extremely luminous radio and mid-IR galaxies at high redshift, revealing their supermassive black hole masses, obscuration levels, and AGN activity through near-IR spectroscopy and photometry, highlighting their heavily obscured nature.

Contribution

First detailed near-IR spectroscopic analysis of this rare, luminous galaxy population, estimating black hole masses and obscuration, and linking AGN activity with galaxy properties.

Findings

Black hole masses estimated between 10^7.9 and 10^9.4 solar masses.

Detected high Eddington ratios (>1) in several sources.

Galaxies are highly obscured with average visual extinction A_V ≈ 3.62 mag.

Abstract

We present near-IR photometry and spectroscopy of 30 extremely luminous radio and mid-IR selected galaxies. With bolometric luminosities exceeding $\sim10^{13}$ $\rm{L_{\odot}}$ and redshifts ranging from $z = 0.880-2.853$, we use VLT instruments X-shooter and ISAAC to investigate this unique population of galaxies. Broad multi-component emission lines are detected in 18 galaxies and we measure the near-IR lines $\rm{H\rm{\beta}}$, $\text{[OIII]}\rm{\lambda}\rm{\lambda}4959,5007$ and $\rm{H\rm{\alpha}}$ in six, 15 and 13 galaxies respectively, with 10 $\rm{Ly\alpha}$ and five CIV lines additionally detected in the UVB arm. We use the broad $\text{[OIII]}\rm{\lambda}5007$ emission lines as a proxy for the bolometric AGN luminosity, and derive lower limits to supermassive black hole masses of $10^{7.9}$-$10^{9.4}$ $\text{M}_{\odot}$ with expectations of corresponding host masses of $10^{10.4}$-$10^{12.0}$ $\text{M}_{\odot}$. We measure $\rm{\lambda}_{Edd}$ > 1 for eight of these sources at a $2\sigma$ significance. Near-IR photometry and SED fitting are used to compare stellar masses directly. We detect both Balmer lines in five galaxies and use these to infer a mean visual extinction of $A_{V}$ = 2.68 mag. Due to non-detections and uncertainties in our $\rm{H\rm{\beta}}$ emission line measurements, we simulate a broad $\rm{H\rm{\beta}}$ line of FWHM = 1480 $\rm{kms^{-1}}$ to estimate extinction for all sources with measured $\rm{H\rm{\alpha}}$ emission. We then use this to infer a mean $A_{V}=3.62$ mag, demonstrating the highly-obscured nature of these galaxies, with the consequence of increasing our estimates of black-hole masses by an 0.5 orders of magnitude in the most extreme and obscured cases.