The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project : the MBH–host relations at 0.2 ∼< z ∼< 0.6 from reverberation mapping and Hubble Space Telescope imaging

Funding: Y.S. acknowledges support from an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and NSF grants AST-1715579, AST-2009947. Support for Program number HST-GO-14109 was provided through a grant from the STScI under NASA contract NAS5-26555. L.C.H. was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0400702) and the National Science Foundation of China (11721303, 11991052). E.D.B. is supported by Padua University grants DOR1715817/17, DOR1885254/18, and DOR1935272/19 and by MIUR grant PRIN 201720173ML3WW_001. J.V.H.S.and K.H. acknowledge funds from a Science and Technology Facilities Council grant ST/R000824/1.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 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 broad-band 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 AGN and quiescent bulge-dominant galaxies, with no strong evidence of evolution in the MBH-M*bulge relation to z~0.6. We further compare the host light fraction from HST imaging decomposition to that estimated from spectral decomposition. We found 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.PostprintPeer reviewe