A REVISED CALIBRATION OF THE VIRIAL MASS ESTIMATOR FOR BLACK HOLES IN ACTIVE GALAXIES BASED ON SINGLE-EPOCH Hβ SPECTRA

摘要

The masses of supermassive black holes (BHs) in broad-line active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can be measured through reverberation mapping, but this method currently cannot be applied to very large samples or to high-redshift AGNs. As a practical alternative, one can devise empirical scaling relations, based on the correlation between broad-line region size and AGN luminosity and the relation between BH mass and bulge stellar velocity dispersion, to estimate the virial masses of BHs from single-epoch spectroscopy. We present a revised calibration of the BH mass estimator for the commonly used Hβ emission line. Our new calibration takes into account the recent determination of the virial coefficient for pseudo and classical bulges.