The Growth of Black Holes: Insights From Obscured Active Galaxies

Understand

Obscured or narrow-line active galaxies offer an unobstructed view of the quasar environment in the presence of a luminous and vigorously accreting black hole.

• We exploit the large new sample of optically selected luminous narrow-line active galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at redshifts 0.1 < z < 0.45, in conjunction with follow-up observations with the Low Dispersion Survey Spectrograph (LDSS3) at Magellan, to study the distributions of black hole mass and host galaxy properties in these extreme objects.
• We find a narrow range in black hole mass (<log M_BH/M_sun> = 8.0 +/- 0.7) and Eddington ratio (<log L/L_Edd> = -0.7 +/- 0.7) for the sample as a whole, surprisingly similar to comparable broad-line systems.
• In contrast, we infer a wide range in star formation properties and host morphologies for the sample, from disk-dominated to elliptical galaxies.