Consistency of the black hole mass determination in AGN from the reverberation and the X-ray excess variance method

2006/06/26 by M. Nikołajuk, M. Nikolajuk, B. Czerny +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Black hole (networking) #Consistency (knowledge bases) #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Geometry #Line (geometry) #Physics #Reverberation #Reverberation mapping #Supermassive black hole #astro-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.10576.x

published as Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.370:1534-1540,2006 · 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; accepted for publication in MNRAS

arxiv created 2006/06/26 · openalex publication_date 2006/06/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Values of black hole masses are frequently determined with the help of the reverberation method. This method requires a specific geometrical factor related to the distribution of the orbits of the broad-line region clouds. Onken et al. determined the value f2= 1.37 ± 0.45 from the black hole mass–dispersion relation. In this paper, we determine this factor using an independent mass determination from the X-ray variance method for a number of Seyfert 1 galaxies and comparing them with the reverberation results by Peterson et al. We obtain mean value f2= 1.12 ± 0.54, consistent with Onken et al. Both values are larger than the value 0.75 corresponding to a spherical geometry. It indicates that most probably all values of the black hole masses obtained with the use of the Kaspi et al. formulae should be multiplied by a factor of ∼1.7. This also shows that the broad-line region is rather flat, and hints for a dependence of the factor f2 on a source inclination seem to be present in the data.

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