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  • The Sloan Digital Sky Surve...
    Li, Jennifer I-Hsiu; Shen, Yue; Ho, Luis C.; Brandt, W. N.; Dalla Bontà, Elena; Alvarez, G. Fonseca; Grier, C. J.; Santisteban, J. V. Hernandez; Homayouni, Y.; Horne, Keith; Peterson, B. M.; Schneider, D. P.; Trump, Jonathan R.

    Astrophysical journal/˜The œAstrophysical journal, 01/2021, Letnik: 906, Številka: 2
    Journal Article

    Abstract We present the results of a pilot Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging study of the host galaxies of ten quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. Probing more than an order of magnitude in black hole (BH) and stellar masses, our sample is the first statistical sample to study the BH–host correlations beyond z  > 0.3 with reliable BH masses from reverberation mapping rather than from single-epoch spectroscopy. We perform image decomposition in two HST bands (UVIS-F606W and IR-F110W) to measure host colors and estimate stellar masses using empirical relations between broadband colors and the mass-to-light ratio. The stellar masses of our targets are mostly dominated by a bulge component. The BH masses and stellar masses of our sample broadly follow the same correlations found for local RM active galactic nuclei and quiescent bulge-dominant galaxies, with no strong evidence of evolution in the relation to z  ∼ 0.6. We further compare the host light fraction from HST imaging decomposition to that estimated from spectral decomposition. We find a good correlation between the host fractions derived with both methods. However, the host fraction derived from spectral decomposition is systematically smaller than that from imaging decomposition by ∼30%, indicating different systematics in both approaches. This study paves the way for upcoming more ambitious host galaxy studies of quasars with direct RM-based BH masses at high redshift.