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Toward Precision Measurement of Central Black Hole Masses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2010

Bradley M. Peterson
Bradley M. Peterson*
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy and Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, The Ohio State University, 140 West 18th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Email: peterson@astronomy.ohio-state.edu
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Abstract

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We review briefly direct and indirect methods of measuring the masses of black holes in galactic nuclei, and then focus attention on supermassive black holes in active nuclei, with special attention to results from reverberation mapping and their limitations. We find that the intrinsic scatter in the relationship between the AGN luminosity and the broad-line region size is very small, ~0.11 dex, comparable to the uncertainties in the better reverberation measurements. We also find that the relationship between reverberation-based black hole masses and host-galaxy bulge luminosities also seems to have surprisingly little intrinsic scatter, ~0.17 dex. We note, however, that there are still potential systematics that could affect the overall mass calibration at the level of a factor of a few.

Keywords

galaxies: activegalaxies: nucleitechniques: spectroscopic
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 5 , Symposium S267: Co-Evolution of Central Black Holes and Galaxies , August 2009 , pp. 151 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010

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