The Accuracy of Supermassive Black Hole Masses Determined by the Single-Epoch-Spectrum (Dibai) Method

Nikolai G. Bochkarev; C. Martin Gaskell

doi:10.1134/s1063773709050016

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arXiv · 0809.4742

The Accuracy of Supermassive Black Hole Masses Determined by the Single-Epoch-Spectrum (Dibai) Method

Nikolai G. Bochkarev·C. Martin Gaskell

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Abstract

The first set of supermassive black hole mass estimates, published from 1980 to 1984 by E. A. Dibai, are shown to be in excellent agreement with recent reverberation-mapping estimates. Comparison of the masses of 17 AGNs covering a mass range from about 10^6 to 10^9 solar masses shows that the Dibai mass estimates agree with reverberation-mapping mass estimates to significantly better than 0.3 dex and were, on average, only 0.14 dex (~ 40%) systematically lower than masses obtained from reverberation mapping. This surprising agreement with the results of over a quarter of a century ago has important implication for the structure and kinematics of AGNs and implies that AGNs are very similar. Our results give strong support to the use of the single-epoch-spectrum (Dibai) method for investigating the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

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Nikolai G. Bochkarev, C. Martin Gaskell. 2009-04-02. The Accuracy of Supermassive Black Hole Masses Determined by the Single-Epoch-Spectrum (Dibai) Method. https://doi.org/10.1134/s1063773709050016

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