Black Hole Mass Estimates from Reverberation Mapping and from Spatially Resolved Kinematics
Abstract
Black hole (BH) masses that have been measured by reverberation mapping in active galaxies fall significantly below the correlation between bulge luminosity and BH mass determined from spatially resolved kinematics of nearby normal galaxies. This discrepancy has created concern that one or both techniques suffer from systematic errors. We show that BH masses from reverberation mapping are consistent with the recently discovered relationship between BH mass and galaxy velocity dispersion. Therefore the bulge luminosities are the probable source of the disagreement, not problems with either method of mass measurement. This result underscores the utility of the BH mass -- velocity dispersion relationship. Reverberation mapping can now be applied with increased confidence to galaxies whose active nuclei are too bright or whose distances are too large for BH searches based on spatially resolved kinematics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0007123,
title = {Black Hole Mass Estimates from Reverberation Mapping and from Spatially Resolved Kinematics},
author = {Karl Gebhardt and John Kormendy and Luis Ho and Ralf Bender and Gary Bower and Alan Dressler and S. M. Faber and Alexei Filippenko and Richard Green and Carl Grillmair and Tod Lauer and John Magorrian and Jason Pinkney and Douglas Richstone and Scott Tremaine},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0007123},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 1 figure, ApJ Letters accepted, minor revisions