Updating calibration of CIV-based single-epoch black hole mass estimators

  • 발행 : 2016.10.12

초록

Black hole (BH) mass is a fundamental quantity to understand BH growth, galaxy evolution, and connection between them. Thus, obtaining accurate and precise BH mass estimates over cosmic time is of paramount importance. The rest-frame UV CIV ${\lambda}1549$ broad emission line is commonly used for BH mass estimates in high-redshift AGNs (i.e., $2{\leq}z{\leq}5$) when single-epoch (SE) optical spectra are available. Achieving correct and accurate calibration for CIV-based SE BH mass estimators against the most reliable reverberation-mapping based BH mass estimates is thus practically important and still useful. By performing multi-component spectral decomposition analysis to obtained high-quality HST UV spectra for the updated sample of local reverberation-mapped AGNs including new HST STIS observations, CIV emission line widths and continuum luminosities are consistently measured. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model with MCMC sampling based on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm (Stan NUTS), we provide the most consistent and accurate calibration of CIV-based BH mass estimators for the three line width characterizations, i.e., full width at half maximum (FWHM), line dispersion (${\sigma}_{line}$), and mean absolute deviation (MAD), in the extended BH mass dynamic range of log $M_{BH}/M_{\odot}=6.5-9.1$.

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