Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 899, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aba001
Keywords
Active galaxies; Galaxy nuclei; Quasars; Supermassive black holes
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation of China [11721303, 11991052]
- National Key R&D Program of China [2016YFA0400702]
- NASA [HST-GO-15260.001-A, HST-GO-15650.002-A.]
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
- NSF [AST-1715579]
- STFC [ST/R000824/1]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science
- University of Arizona
- Brazilian Participation Group
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Florida
- French Participation Group
- German Participation Group
- Harvard University
- Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
- Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group
- Johns Hopkins University
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
- New Mexico State University
- New York University
- Ohio State University
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of Portsmouth
- Princeton University
- Spanish Participation Group
- University of Tokyo
- University of Utah
- Vanderbilt University
- University of Virginia
- University of Washington
- Yale University
- National Astronomical Observatories
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance in China
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Results from a few decades of reverberation mapping (RM) studies have revealed a correlation between the radius of the broad-line emitting region (BLR) and the continuum luminosity of active galactic nuclei. This radius-luminosity relation enables survey-scale black hole mass estimates across cosmic time, using relatively inexpensive single-epoch spectroscopy, rather than intensive RM time monitoring. However, recent results from newer RM campaigns challenge this widely used paradigm, reporting quasar BLR sizes that differ significantly from the previously established radius-luminosity relation. Using simulations of the radius-luminosity relation with the observational parameters of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project, we find that this difference is not likely due to observational biases. Instead, it appears that previous RM samples were biased to a subset of quasar properties, and the broader parameter space occupied by the SDSS-RM quasar sample has a genuinely wider range of BLR sizes. We examine the correlation between the deviations from the radius-luminosity relation and several quasar parameters; the most significant correlations indicate that the deviations depend on the UV/optical spectral energy distribution and the relative amount of ionizing radiation. Our results indicate that single-epoch black hole mass estimates that do not account for the diversity of quasars in the radius-luminosity relation could be overestimated by an average of similar to 0.3 dex.
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