Investigating AGN black hole masses and the MBH-σe relation for low surface brightness galaxies

Abstract

We present an analysis of the optical nuclear spectra from the active galactic nuclei (AGN) in a sample of low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we derived the virial black hole (BH) masses of 24 galaxies from their broad Hα parameters. We find that our estimates of nuclear BH masses lie in the range 105- 107M⊙, with a median mass of 5.62 × 106M⊙. The bulge stellar velocity dispersion σe was determined from the underlying stellar spectra.We compared our results with the existing BH mass-velocity dispersion (MBH-σe) correlations and found that the majority of our sample lie in the low BH mass regime and below the MBH-σe correlation. We analysed the effects of any systematic bias in the MBH estimates, the effects of galaxy orientation in the measurement of σe and the increase of σe due to the presence of bars and found that these effects are insufficient to explain the observed offset in MBH-σe correlation. Thus, the LSB galaxies tend to have low-mass BHs which probably are not in co-evolution with the host galaxy bulges. A detailed study of the nature of the bulges and the role of dark matter in the growth of the BHs is needed to further understand the BH-bulge co-evolution in these poorly evolved and dark matter dominated systems.