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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2(800), p. L35, 2015

DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/800/2/l35

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Polarization in lines - a new method for measuring black hole masses in active galaxies

Journal article published in 2015 by Victor L. Afanasiev, Luka C. Popovic ORCID, Luka Č. Popović
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Measuring of the masses of galactic supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is an important task, since they correlate with the host galaxy properties and play an important role in evolution of galaxies. Here we present a new method for measuring of SMBH masses using the polarization of the broad lines emitted from active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We performed spectropolarometric observations of 9 AGNs and find that this method gives measured masses which are in a good agreement with reverberation measurements. An advantage of this method is that it can be used to measure the masses of SMBHs in a consistent way at different cosmological epochs. ; Comment: ApJL accepted