English

Quasar Host Galaxies and the $M_{SMBH}$ - $\sigma_{*}$ Relation

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-01-18 v1

Abstract

We analyze the emission line profiles detected in deep optical spectra of quasars to derive the mass of their super-massive black holes (SMBH) following the single-epoch virial method. Our sample consists in 6 radio-loud quasars and 4 radio-quiet quasars. We carefully fit a broad and narrow Gaussian component for each emission line in both the Hβ\beta (10 objects) and Hα\alpha regions (5 objects). A very good agreement of the derived SMBH masses, MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH}, is found using the fitted broad Hβ\beta and Hα\alpha emission lines. We compare our MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH} results with those found by previous studies. We study the relationship between the MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH} of the quasar and the stellar velocity dispersion, σ\sigma_{*}, of the host galaxy. We use the measured MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH} and σ\sigma_{*} to investigate the MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH} - σ\sigma_{*} relation for both the radio-loud and radio-quiet subsamples. Besides the scatter, we find a good agreement between radio-quiet quasars and AGN+quiescent galaxies and between radio-loud quasars and AGN. Our analysis does not support the hypothesis of using σ\sigma([O III] λ\lambda5007) as a surrogate for stellar velocity dispersions in high-mass, high-luminosity quasars. We also investigate the relationship between the 5 GHz radio-continuum luminosity, L 5GHzL_{\rm~5\,GHz}, of the quasar host galaxy with both MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH} and σ\sigma_{*}. We do not find any correlation between L5GHzL_{\rm 5\,GHz} and MSMBHM_{\rm SMBH}, although we observe a trend that galaxies with larger stellar velocity dispersions have larger L5GHzL_{\rm 5\,GHz}. Using the results of our fitting for the narrow emission lines of [O III] λ\lambda5007 and [N II] λ\lambda6583 we estimate the gas-phase oxygen abundance of six quasars, being sub-solar in all cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.00528,
  title  = {Quasar Host Galaxies and the $M_{SMBH}$ - $\sigma_{*}$ Relation},
  author = {Andrew I. Sheinis and Ángel R. López-Sánchez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.00528},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. 32 pages, 15 figures, 7 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:11:20.100Z