Testing the Evolution of the Correlations between Supermassive Black Holes and their Host Galaxies using Eight Strongly Lensed Quasars

Abstract

One of the main challenges in using high redshift active galactic nuclei to study the correlations between the mass of the supermassive Black Hole (M BH ) and the properties of their active host galaxies is instrumental resolution. Strong lensing magnification effectively increases instrumental resolution and thus helps to address this challenge. In this work, we study eight strongly lensed active galactic nuclei (AGN) with deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, using the lens modelling code L to reconstruct the image of the source. Using the reconstructed brightness of the host galaxy, we infer the host galaxy stellar mass based on stellar population models. M BH are estimated from broad emission lines using standard methods. Our results are in good agreement with recent work based on non-lensed AGN, providing additional evidence that the correlation evolves over cosmic time. At the moment, the sample size of lensed AGN is small and thus they provide mostly a consistency check on systematic errors related to resolution for the non-lensed AGN. However, the number of known lensed AGN is expected to increase dramatically in the next few years, through dedicated searches in ground and space based wide field surveys, and they may become a key diagnostic of black hole and galaxy co-evolution.

SLITronomy: towards a fully wavelet-based strong lensing inversion technique

“…It has also been shown that some properties of source galaxies can be recovered to sufficient precision without using pixel-level modelling (e.g. for deriving AGN mass-luminosity relation, Ding et al 2020a). However, for certain applications that require insights on small-scale features in source galaxies, such as the study of star-forming regions (e.g.…”

“…Strongly lensed quasars are particularly useful to constrain black hole evolution over a wide range of redshifts (e.g. Ding et al 2020a) and to derive high-precision constraints on the Hubble constant (Wong et al 2019;Shajib et al 2020a;Birrer et al 2020, now referred as the TDCOSMO collaboration). All of the above applications require lens modelling tools.…”

Discovering Strongly-lensed QSOs From Unresolved Light Curves

“…They can be used to measure the initial mass function (IMF) and dark-matter substructures in the lensing galaxies (e.g., Mao & Schneider 1998;Metcalf & Madau 2001;Dalal & Kochanek 2002;Pooley et al 2009;Nierenberg et al 2014;Oguri et al 2014;Schechter et al 2014;Jiménez-Vicente & Mediavilla 2019). They also serve as a unique probe of the size and temperature profile of black hole accretion discs and black hole/host galaxy scaling relations at cosmological distances (e.g., Peng et al 2006;Ding et al 2017;Bate et al 2018;Morgan et al 2018;Ding et al 2020). The statistics of a well-defined sample of strongly-lensed QSOs can provide a simple and robust constraint on the structure growth and hence dark energy (e.g., Chae 2007; Oguri et al 2008Oguri et al , 2012.…”