Distances & Black Hole Masses of Nearby Seyferts

Observations conducted over the past two decades have revealed that the masses of supermassive black holes scale with several properties of their host galaxies, and these scaling relations are commonly interpreted as evidence for galaxy-black hole coevolution over cosmic time. It is thus vital to obtain accurate measurements of both black hole masses and galaxy characteristics to further our understanding of the physics behind black hole and galaxy growth and evolution. We will briefly review our published work in distance measurements and galaxy mass constraints for a sample of 24 AGN host galaxies. We will focus on preliminary results from dynamical modeling of the broad line regions (BLRs) of 5 nearby AGNs. Using high-quality reverberation-mapping data from 2012, we model the optical continuum, Hβ, and He II light curves to constrain the kinematics, geometry, and inclination (among other parameters) of the low- and high-ionization BLRs. Traditional reverberation-mapping techniques measure the mean BLR radius and time delay between the continuum and emission line flux variations, and require the virial factor, f, to account for the unknown dynamics of the BLR gas. The direct modeling approach, however, allows independent measurement of black hole mass without the necessity for f. We add these to the growing sample of direct reverberation masses that are independent of any assumption of a virial factor.