TY - JOUR
T1 - Masses of black holes in active galactic nuclei
AU - Peterson, Bradley M.
AU - Grier, Catherine J.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful for support of this research at The Ohio State University by the NSF through grant AST-1008882 and by NASA through grants HST-GO-11661 and HST-AR-12149 from the Space Telescope Science Institute. CJG gratefully acknowledges support from an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship. The authors apologize for the limited reference list necessitated by space considerations.
Publisher Copyright:
© owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - The masses of the central black holes have been measured for nearly 50 AGNs by using emissionline reverberation mapping. We briefly outline the process by which this is done and discuss the evidence about how reliable the derived masses might be. We outline how reverberation mapping underpins the mass estimates for all AGNs, including high-redshift quasars, and point out that the mass estimates are based on reasonable, yet unproven, assumptions. Finally, we briefly discuss results on reverberation velocity-delay maps that are revealing the kinematics of the broad-line region and yielding direct measurements of black hole masses.
AB - The masses of the central black holes have been measured for nearly 50 AGNs by using emissionline reverberation mapping. We briefly outline the process by which this is done and discuss the evidence about how reliable the derived masses might be. We outline how reverberation mapping underpins the mass estimates for all AGNs, including high-redshift quasars, and point out that the mass estimates are based on reasonable, yet unproven, assumptions. Finally, we briefly discuss results on reverberation velocity-delay maps that are revealing the kinematics of the broad-line region and yielding direct measurements of black hole masses.
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85052447093
VL - 2012-November
JO - Proceedings of Science
JF - Proceedings of Science
SN - 1824-8039
M1 - 030
T2 - 2012 Nuclei of Seyfert Galaxies and QSOs - Central Engine and Conditions of Star Formation, Seyfert 2012
Y2 - 6 November 2012 through 8 November 2012
ER -