Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 811, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/811/2/91
Keywords
galaxies: active; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: nuclei; galaxies: stellar content; quasars: general; quasars: supermassive black holes
Categories
Funding
- NSF [AST-1108604]
- Chinese Academy of Science (Emergence of Cosmological Structures) from the Strategic Priority Research Program [XDB09030102]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [11473002]
- NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute for NASA [HST-HF-51314, NAS 5-26555]
- China Scholarship Council [[2013]3009]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science
- University of Arizona
- Brazilian Participation Group
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- University of Cambridge
- 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
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Quasar host galaxies are key for understanding the relation between galaxies and the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at their centers. We present a study of 191 broad-line quasars and their host galaxies at z < 1, using high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) spectra produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping project. Clear detection of stellar absorption lines allows a reliable decomposition of the observed spectra into nuclear and host components, using spectral models of quasar and stellar radiations as well as emission lines from the interstellar medium. We estimate age, mass M-*, and velocity dispersion sigma(*) of the host stars, the star formation rate (SFR), quasar luminosity, and SMBH mass M-center dot, for each object. The quasars are preferentially hosted by massive galaxies with M-* similar to 10(11) M-circle dot characterized by stellar ages around 1 billion yr, which coincides with the transition phase of normal galaxies from the blue cloud to the red sequence. The host galaxies have relatively low SFRs and fall below the main sequence of star-forming galaxies at similar redshifts. These facts suggest that the hosts have experienced an episode of major star formation sometime in the past 1 billion yr, which was subsequently quenched or suppressed. The derived M-center dot-sigma(*) and M-center dot-M-* relations agree with our past measurements and are consistent with no evolution from the local universe. The present analysis demonstrates that reliable measurements of stellar properties of quasar host galaxies are possible with high-S/N fiber spectra, which will be acquired in large numbers with future powerful instruments such as the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph.
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