BLACK HOLE MASS AND BULGE LUMINOSITY FOR LOW-MASS BLACK HOLES

Journal Article · Sat Aug 20 04:00:00 EDT 2011 · Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/737/2/L45· OSTI ID:21562464

Yanfei, Jiang; Greene, Jenny E ^[1]; Ho, Luis C ^[2]

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1. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
2. The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, CA 91101 (United States)

We study the scaling between bulge magnitude and central black hole (BH) mass in galaxies with virial BH masses {approx}< 10{sup 6} M{sub sun}. Based on careful image decomposition of a snapshot Hubble Space Telescope I-band survey, we found that these BHs are found predominantly in galaxies with pseudobulges. Here we show that the M{sub BH}-L{sub bulge} relation for the pseudobulges at low mass is significantly different from classical bulges with BH masses {>=}10{sup 7} M{sub sun}. Specifically, bulges span a much wider range of bulge luminosity, and on average the luminosity is larger, at fixed M{sub BH}. The trend holds both for the active galaxies from Bentz et al. and the inactive sample of Gueltekin et al. and cannot be explained by differences in stellar populations, as it persists when we use dynamical bulge masses. Put another way, the ratio between bulge and BH mass is much larger than {approx}1000 for our sample. This is consistent with recent suggestions that M{sub BH} does not scale with the pseudobulge luminosity. The low-mass scaling relations appear to flatten, consistent with predictions from Volonteri and Natarajan for massive seed BHs.

• OSTI ID: 21562464
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal Letters, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Letters Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 737; ISSN 2041-8205
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
BLACK HOLES
GALAXIES
GALAXY NUCLEI
LUMINOSITY
MASS
OPTICAL PROPERTIES
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
SCALING