2024/09/13 by J. Molina, Luis C. Ho, Molina, J. +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.08893
openalex publication_date 2024/09/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We analyzed MUSE observations of 42 local z<0.1 type 1 active galactic nucleus (AGN) host galaxies taken from the Palomar-Green quasar sample and the close AGN reference survey. Our goal was to study the relation between the black hole mass (M_\bullet) and bulge stellar velocity dispersion (σe) for type 1 active galaxies. The sample spans black hole masses of 106.0-109.2 M_\odot, bolometric luminosities of 1042.9-1046.0 erg s-1, and Eddington ratios of 0.006-1.2. We avoided AGN emission by extracting the spectra over annular apertures. We modeled the calcium triplet stellar features and measured stellar velocity dispersions of σ_* = 60-230 km s-1 for the host galaxies. We find σ_* values in agreement with previous measurements for local AGN host galaxies, but slightly lower compared with those reported for nearby X-ray-selected type 2 quasars. Using a novel annular aperture correction recipe to estimate σe from σ_* that considers the bulge morphology and observation beam-smearing, we estimate flux-weighted σe = 60-250 km s-1. If we consider the bulge type when estimating M_\bullet, we find no statistical difference between the distributions of AGN hosts and the inactive galaxies on the M_\bullet - σe plane for M_\bullet \lesssim 108 M_\odot. Conversely, if we do not consider the bulge type when computing M_\bullet, we find that both distributions disagree. We find no correlation between the degree of offset from the M_\bullet - σe relation and Eddington ratio for M_\bullet \lesssim 108 M_\odot. The current statistics preclude firm conclusions from being drawn for the high-mass range. We argue these observations support notions that a significant fraction of the local type 1 AGNs and quasars have undermassive black holes compared with their host galaxy bulge properties.