AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 114. Quasars
Poster, Thursday, January 9, 2003, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall AB

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[114.05] Narrow Emission Lines as Surrogates for \sigma* in Low- to Moderate-z QSOs

S. Salviander, G.A. Shields, K. Gebhardt (University of Texas - Austin)

Galactic nuclei harbor supermassive black holes with masses closely related to the properties of the bulge component of the host galaxy, in particular the stellar velocity dispersion, \sigma*. This is based on dynamical studies of nearby galactic nuclei. QSOs afford an opportunity to extend such results to more distant objects, as the black hole mass can be estimated from the width of the broad H\beta and Mg II lines. The width of the narrow [O III] lines in AGN appears to be proportional to \sigma*. This affords an opportunity to measure \sigma* in large samples of AGN, including distant quasars with large look-back times (Shields, G.A. et al. 2003, ApJ, in press, astro-ph/0210050). Use of the [O II] line width in place of [O III] would allow study of higher redshift objects in any given observational spectral window. We investigate the utility of the [O II] line width as a surrogate for \sigma* in low- to moderate-redshift QSOs, using available spectroscopic data sets, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: triples@astro.as.utexas.edu

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