Testing a scale-independent method to measure the mass of black holes

Abstract

Estimating the black hole mass at the center of galaxies is a fundamental step not only for understanding the physics of accretion, but also for the cosmological evolution of galaxies. Recently, a new method, based solely on X-ray data, was successfully applied to determine the black hole mass in Galactic systems. Since X-rays are thought to be produced via Comptonization process both in stellar and supermassive black holes, in principle, the same method may be applied to estimate the mass in supermassive black holes. In this work we test this hypothesis by performing a systematic analysis of a sample of active galactic nuclei, whose black hole mass has been already determined via reverberation mapping and which possess high-quality XMM-Newton archival data. The good agreement obtained between the black hole masses derived with this novel scaling technique and the reverberation mapping values suggests that this method is robust and works equally well on stellar and supermassive black holes, making it a truly scale-independent technique for black hole determination. © 2011. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..