Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. V. The Relation Between Black Hole Mass and Host Galaxy Luminosity for a Sample of 79 Active Galaxies

Abstract

We investigate the cosmic evolution of the black hole (BH) mass-bulge luminosity relation using a sample of 52 active galaxies at z ∼ 0.36 and z ∼ 0.57 in the BH mass range of 10 7.4-10 9.1 M 0. By consistently applying multicomponent spectral and structural decomposition to high-quality Keck spectra and high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images, BH masses (M BH) are estimated using the Hβ broad emission line combined with the 5100 Å nuclear luminosity, and bulge luminosities (L bul) are derived from surface photometry. Comparing the resulting M BH − L bul relation to local active galaxies and taking into account selection effects, we find evolution of the form M BH /L bul ∝ (1 + z) γ with γ = 1.8 ± 0.7, consistent with BH growth preceding that of the host galaxies. Including an additional sample of 27 active galaxies with 0.5 < z < 1.9 taken from the literature and measured in a consistent way, we obtain γ = 0.9±0.7 for the M BH −L bul relation and γ = 0.4±0.5 for the M BH-total host galaxy luminosity (L host) relation. The results strengthen the findings from our previous studies and provide additional evidence for host galaxy bulge growth being dominated by disk-to-bulge transformation via minor mergers and/or disk instabilities.

A Systematic Search for Hidden Type 1 AGNs: Gas Kinematics and Scaling Relations

“…We utilize log f=0.05 for the FWHM-based M BH estimator and log f=0.65 for σ-based M BH , which were obtained from the recent calibration based on the M BH -σ * relation of quiescent galaxies and Hβ reverberation-mapped AGNs (Woo et al 2015). We use the luminosity of the broad Hα component (L Hα ) as a proxy for the bolometric luminosity (L bol ), by utilizing the relation between Hα and the continuum luminosity at 5100Å , and the bolometric correction 9.26 for L 5100 (Richards et al 2006) as:…”

“…We adopt the most recent calibration by Woo et al (2015) The offset may be interpreted in different ways. First these hidden type 1 AGNs may not follow the same M BH -σ * relation compared to typical type 1 AGNs.…”

Scaling relations between black holes and their host galaxies: comparing theoretical and observational measurements, and the impact of selection effects

“…Observational data are provided as colored datapoints. Note: for the Woo et al (2006Woo et al ( , 2008 data, we use the updated BH mass estimates from Park et al (2014). Figure 2, we provide the best fitting relation as a dashed pink line (with the z = 0.06 fit shown in all panels in grey for reference), and observational measurements as colored datapoints.…”

“…Thus the evolution is dominated by the evolution in the stellar-mass-to-light ratio of the host, rather than interactions with the black hole. To account for this, we apply the correction used in Treu et al (2007), Bennert et al (2010), and Park et al (2014): log LV,0 = log LV − (0.62 ± 0.09) × z, and use LV,0 when calculating ∆MBH for Figure 5. Having made this correction, ∆MBH relative to host luminosity has a stronger redshift evolution than based on stellar mass.…”

“…We concentrate on the prediction for the black holegalaxy relations relative to the the total stellar mass and luminosity of the host galaxy as measured by Merloni et al (2010); Bennert et al (2010Bennert et al ( , 2011b; Kormendy & Ho (2013); Park et al (2014). The predictions from the simulations are most direct for the total quantities (stellar mass and luminosity) and we do not need to indroduce unknown biases as we would have if we used proxies for these measurements in galaxy bulge components (we reserve this work to a future analysis with morphological decomposion).…”