Correcting CIV-based virial black hole masses Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Coatman L.
  2. Hewett P.C.
  3. Banerji M.
  4. Richards G.T.
  5. Hennawi J.F.,Prochaska J.X.
  6. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

The CIV{lambda}{lambda}1498,1501 broad emission line is visible in optical spectra to redshifts exceeding z~5. CIV has long been known to exhibit significant displacements to the blue and these 'blueshifts' almost certainly signal the presence of strong outflows. As a consequence, single-epoch virial black hole (BH) mass estimates derived from CIV velocity widths are known to be systematically biased compared to masses from the hydrogen Balmer lines. Using a large sample of 230 high-luminosity (L_Bol_=10^45.5^-10^48^erg/s), redshift 1.5<z<4.0 quasars with both CIV and Balmer line spectra, we have quantified the bias in CIV BH masses as a function of the CIV blueshift. CIV BH masses are shown to be a factor of 5 larger than the corresponding Balmer-line masses at C IV blueshifts of 3000km/s and are overestimated by almost an order of magnitude at the most extreme blueshifts, ?=5000km/s. Using the monotonically increasing relationship between the CIV blueshift and the mass ratio BH(CIV)/BH(H{alpha}), we derive an empirical correction to all CIV BH masses. The scatter between the corrected CIV masses and the Balmer masses is 0.24dex at low CIV blueshifts (~0km/s) and just 0.10dex at high blueshifts (~3000km/s), compared to 0.40dex before the correction. The correction depends only on the CIV line properties - i.e. full width at half-maximum and blueshift - and can therefore be applied to all quasars where CIV emission line properties have been measured, enabling the derivation of unbiased virial BH-mass estimates for the majority of high-luminosity, high-redshift, spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the literature.

Keywords
  1. quasars
  2. spectroscopy
  3. redshifted
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2017MNRAS.465.2120C
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https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/465/2120
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/465/2120

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History

2018-11-15T16:23:34Z
Resource record created
2018-11-15T16:23:34Z
Created
2019-06-06T11:58:44Z
Updated

Contact

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