Black Holes and Host Galaxies of NLS1s

Recently, reliable mass estimates for the central black holes in AGN became feasible due to emission-line reverberation techniques. Using this method as a calibrator, it is possible to determine black hole masses for a wide range of AGN, in particular NLS1s. Do NLS1s have smaller black holes than ordinary Seyfert 1 galaxies? Are their black holes smaller compared to the sizes of their host galaxies? Do they have larger L/M ratios? Do NLS1s have hotter accretion disks? I confront these questions with accretion disk theory and with the data, showing that the above may well be the case.Comment: Contributed talk presented at the Joint MPE,AIP,ESO workshop on NLS1s, Bad Honnef, Dec. 1999, to appear in New Astronomy Reviews; also available at http://wave.xray.mpe.mpg.de/conferences/nls1-worksho