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A Breakdown of the Black Hole-Bulge Mass Relation in Local Active Galaxies

Astrophysical Journal, ISSN: 1538-4357, Vol: 971, Issue: 2
2024
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Article Description

We investigate the relation between black hole (BH) mass and bulge stellar mass for a sample of 117 local (z ∼ 0) galaxies hosting low-luminosity, broad-line active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Our sample comes from Reines & Volonteri, who found that, for a given total stellar mass, these AGNs have BH masses more than an order of magnitude smaller than those in early-type galaxies with quiescent BHs. Here, we aim to determine whether or not this AGN sample falls on the canonical BH-to-bulge mass relation by utilizing bulge-disk decompositions and determining bulge stellar masses using color-dependent mass-to-light ratios. We find that our AGN sample remains offset by more than an order of magnitude from the M -M relation defined by early-type galaxies with dynamically detected BHs. We caution that using canonical BH-to-bulge mass relations for galaxies other than ellipticals and bulge-dominated systems may lead to highly biased interpretations. This work bears directly on predictions for gravitational-wave detections and cosmological simulations that are tied to the local BH-to-bulge mass relations.

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