A comparison of single-epoch black hole masses at z>0.5

  • Published : 2015.04.10

Abstract

Accurately estimating black hole (BH) masses at high redshifts is imperative in the current and future era of large-area extragalactic spectroscopic surveys. We present an extension of existing comparisons between rest-frame UV and optical virial BH mass estimators to intermediate redshifts, lower luminosities, and lower BH masses, comparable to the local $H{\beta}$ reverberation-mapping sample. We use data from the AGES survey and also newly acquired near-infrared spectra from the FMOS instrument on Subaru telescope for 89 broad-lined active galaxies at redshifts between 0.5 and 1.6. We focus on the MgII, CIV, and CIII broad emission lines and compare them to both $H{\alpha}$ and $H{\beta}$, using two different prescriptions to describe their emission profile width. We confirm that MgII shows a tight correlation with $H{\alpha}$, with a scatter of ~0.25 dex. The CIV and CIII estimators can be considered viable virial mass estimators, despite large scatter values. We combine our dataset with previous high redshift and high luminosity CIV and CIII measurements from the literature and we calculate a scatter of $\sim0.4$ dex and an offset to the 1:1 relation consistent with 0 for the combined sample. This updated comparison spans a total of 4 decades in BH mass, a much wider range than any previous individual study.

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