Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. V. The Relation between Black Hole Mass and Host Galaxy Luminosity for a Sample of 79 Active Galaxies

We investigate the cosmic evolution of the black hole (BH) mass-bulge luminosity relation using a sample of 52 active galaxies at z ~ 0.36 and z ~ 0.57 in the BH mass range of 10^7.4-10^9.1 M _⊙. By consistently applying multicomponent spectral and structural decomposition to high-quality Keck spectra and high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images, BH masses (M _BH) are estimated using the Hβ broad emission line combined with the 5100 Å nuclear luminosity, and bulge luminosities (L _bul) are derived from surface photometry. Comparing the resulting M _BH - L _bul relation to local active galaxies and taking into account selection effects, we find evolution of the form M _BH/L _bulvprop(1 + z)^γ with γ = 1.8 ± 0.7, consistent with BH growth preceding that of the host galaxies. Including an additional sample of 27 active galaxies with 0.5 < z < 1.9 taken from the literature and measured in a consistent way, we obtain γ = 0.9 ± 0.7 for the M _BH - L _bul relation and γ = 0.4 ± 0.5 for the M _BH-total host galaxy luminosity (L _host) relation. The results strengthen the findings from our previous studies and provide additional evidence for host galaxy bulge growth being dominated by disk-to-bulge transformation via minor mergers and/or disk instabilities.