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Paper: Adaptive Optics-assisted 3D Spectroscopic Observations for Black Hole Mass Measurements
Volume: 373, The Central Engine of Active Galactic Nuclei
Page: 49
Authors: Pastorini, G.
Abstract: The very high spatial resolution provided by adaptive optics- assisted spectroscopic observations at 8m-class telescopes (e.g., with SINFONI at the VLT) will allow to greatly increase the number of direct black hole (BH) mass measurements which is currently very small. This is a fundamental step to investigate the tight link between galaxy evolution and BH growth, revealed by the existing scaling relations between MBH and galaxy structural parameters. I present preliminary results from SINFONI K-band spectroscopic observations of a sample of 5 objects with MBH measurements obtained with the reverberation mapping (RM) technique. This technique is the starting point to derive the so-called virial MBH estimates, currently the only way to measure MBH at high redshift. Our goal is to assess the reliability of RM by measuring MBH with both gas and stellar kinematical methods and to investigate whether active galaxies follow the same MBH-galaxy correlations as normal ones.
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