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Session 103 - Quasars & Blazars.
Display session, Saturday, January 10
Exhibit Hall,
Ground-based, near-infrared imaging of nearby quasars has indicated that, for the most luminous quasars, there is a minimum required host mass that increases with nuclear luminosity. This luminosity/host-mass limit is possibly a manifestation of a universal value of the mass fraction of the central black hole compared to the mass of the host galaxy's spheroid, and thus could provide important clues to the role of the AGN phenomenon in galaxy formation and evolution. The limitations of ground-based imaging preclude a detailed understanding of this relation, so we have undertaken a NICMOS imaging campaign to investigate it further. The NICMOS images allow us to view the host galaxies with less contamination from the nucleus than is possible at visible wavelengths. We report here on the first results of NICMOS H-band imaging of 16 quasars with 0.2\lesssim z\lesssim 0.4.
