English

The Most Massive Active Galactic Nuclei at $1\lesssim z \lesssim 2$

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-03-29 v2

Abstract

We obtained near-infrared spectra of 26 SDSS quasars at 0.7<z<2.50.7<z<2.5 with reported rest-frame ultraviolet MBH1010MM_{\rm BH} \sim 10^{10}M_{\odot} to critically examine the systematic effects involved with their mass estimations. We find that AGNs heavier than 1010M10^{10}M_{\odot} often display double-peaked Hα\alpha emission, extremely broad FeII complex emission around MgII, and highly blueshifted and broadened CIV emission. The weight of this evidence, combined with previous studies, cautions against the use of MBHM_{\rm BH} values based on any emission line with a width over 8000 km/s. Also, the MBHM_{\rm BH} estimations are not positively biased along the presence of ionized narrow line outflows, anisotropic radiation, or the use of line FWHM instead of σ\sigma for our sample, and unbiased with variability, scatter in broad line equivalent width, or obscuration for general type-1 quasars. Removing the systematically uncertain MBHM_{\rm BH} values, 1010M\sim10^{10}M_{\odot} BHs in 1z21\lesssim z \lesssim 2 AGNs can still be explained by anisotropic motion of the broad line region from 109.5M\sim10^{9.5}M_{\odot} BHs, although current observations support they are intrinsically most massive, and overmassive to the host's bulge mass.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.04468,
  title  = {The Most Massive Active Galactic Nuclei at $1\lesssim z \lesssim 2$},
  author = {Hyunsung D. Jun and Myungshin Im and Dohyeong Kim and Daniel Stern},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.04468},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

21 pages, accepted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:51:41.901Z