Quasars and Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies: At the Limit?
Abstract
We have detected the host galaxies of 16 nearby, radio-quiet quasars using images obtained with the Near-Infrared Camera and MultiObject Spectrometer. We confirm that these luminous quasars tend to live in luminous, early-type host galaxies, and we use the host-galaxy magnitudes to refine the luminosity/host-mass limit inferred from ground-based studies. If quasars obey the relation M_(blackhole)/M_(spheroid) ~ 0.006 found for massive dark objects in nonactive galaxies, then our analysis implies that they radiate at up to ~20% of the Eddington rate. An analogous analysis for ultraluminous infrared galaxies shows them to accrete at up to similar Eddington fractions, consistent with the hypothesis that some of them are powered by embedded quasars.
Additional Information
© 1999. The American Astronomical Society. Received 1998 October 7; accepted 1998 November 30; published 1998 December 18. Support for this work was provided by NASA through grant GO-07421.01-96A from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. We also gratefully acknowledge support from the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium. We especially thank the NICMOS team for putting up a great instrument, Brian McLeod for putting together the NICRED reduction package, and Erin Condy for assistance with the data reduction. We are grateful to the referee for a concise, constructive report that improved the quality of the manuscript.Attached Files
Published - McLeod_1999_ApJ_511_L67.pdf
Submitted - 9812023.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 75280
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170321-142103832
- GO-07421.01-96A
- NASA
- NAS5-26555
- NASA
- Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium
- Created
-
2017-03-21Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field