Virial-based methods for estimating active supermassive black hole masses are now commonly used on extremely large spectroscopic quasar catalogues. Most spectral analyses, though, do not pay enough attention to a detailed continuum decomposition. To understand how this affects virial mass estimate results, we test the influence of host galaxy light on them, along with Balmer continuum component. A detailed fit with the new spectroscopic analysis software QSFit demonstrated that the presence or absence of continuum components do not affect significantly the virial-based results for our sample. Taking or not in consideration a host galaxy component, instead, affects the emission line fitting in a more pronounced way at lower redshifts, where in fact we observe dimmer quasars and more visible host galaxies.
@article{arxiv.1803.08504,
title = {AGN mass estimates in large spectroscopic surveys: the effect of host galaxy light},
author = {Ludovica Varisco and Tullia Sbarrato and Giorgio Calderone and Massimo Dotti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.08504},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication on A&A