Virilization of the Broad Line Region in Active Galactic Nuclei—connection between shifts and widths of broad emission lines

Abstract

We investigate the virilization of the emission lines (Formula presented.) and Mg II in the sample of 287 Type 1 Active Galactic Nuclei taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database. We explore the connections between the intrinsic line shifts and full widths at different levels of maximal intensity. We found that: (i) (Formula presented.) seems to be a good virial estimator of black hole masses, and an intrinsic redshift of (Formula presented.) is dominantly caused by the gravitational effect, (ii) there is an anti-correlation between the redshift and width of the wings of the Mg II line, (iii) the broad Mg II line can be used as virial estimator only at 50 % of the maximal intensity, while the widths and intrinsic shifts of the line wings cannot be used for this purpose.