The Low-luminosity End of the Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei
Misty C. Bentz,Kelly D. Denney,Catherine J. Grier,Aaron J. Barth,Bradley M. Peterson,Marianne Vestergaard,Marianne Vestergaard,Vardha N. Bennert,Gabriela Canalizo,Gisella De Rosa,Alexei V. Filippenko,Elinor L. Gates,Jenny E. Greene,Weidong Li,Matthew A. Malkan,Richard W. Pogge,Daniel Stern,Tommaso Treu,Jong-Hak Woo +18 more
TLDR
In this article, the authors present an updated and revised analysis of the relationship between the H{beta} broadline region (BLR) radius and the luminosity of the active galactic nucleus (AGN).Abstract:
We present an updated and revised analysis of the relationship between the H{beta} broad-line region (BLR) radius and the luminosity of the active galactic nucleus (AGN). Specifically, we have carried out two-dimensional surface brightness decompositions of the host galaxies of nine new AGNs imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3. The surface brightness decompositions allow us to create ''AGN-free'' images of the galaxies, from which we measure the starlight contribution to the optical luminosity measured through the ground-based spectroscopic aperture. We also incorporate 20 new reverberation-mapping measurements of the H{beta} time lag, which is assumed to yield the average H{beta} BLR radius. The final sample includes 41 AGNs covering four orders of magnitude in luminosity. The additions and updates incorporated here primarily affect the low-luminosity end of the R{sub BLR}-L relationship. The best fit to the relationship using a Bayesian analysis finds a slope of {alpha}= 0.533{sup +0.035}{sub -0.033}, consistent with previous work and with simple photoionization arguments. Only two AGNs appear to be outliers from the relationship, but both of them have monitoring light curves that raise doubt regarding the accuracy of their reported time lags. The scatter around the relationship is found to be 0.19more » {+-} 0.02 dex, but would be decreased to 0.13 dex by the removal of these two suspect measurements. A large fraction of the remaining scatter in the relationship is likely due to the inaccurate distances to the AGN host galaxies. Our results help support the possibility that the R{sub BLR}-L relationship could potentially be used to turn the BLRs of AGNs into standardizable candles. This would allow the cosmological expansion of the universe to be probed by a separate population of objects, and over a larger range of redshifts.« lessread more
Citations
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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Low-ionization Broad-line Widths and Implications for Virial Black Hole Mass Estimation
Shu Wang,Yue Shen,Linhua Jiang,Keith Horne,W. N. Brandt,Catherine J. Grier,Catherine J. Grier,Luis C. Ho,Y. Homayouni,Jennifer I-Hsiu Li,Donald P. Schneider,Jonathan R. Trump +11 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed an approach for the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) through a China-Chile Joint Research Fund (CJF) to support the development of a Chinese-CAS-based space telescope.
Journal ArticleDOI
Swift/UVOT grism monitoring of NGC 5548 in 2013: an attempt at MgII reverberation mapping
Edward M. Cackett,Kayhan Gültekin,Misty C. Bentz,Michael Fausnaugh,Bradley M. Peterson,Jon S. Troyer,Marianne Vestergaard +6 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors performed reverberation mapping using MgII in the well-studied nearby Seyfert 1, NGC 5548, to estimate high-redshift black hole masses.
Journal ArticleDOI
Spectropolarimetry of Seyfert 1 galaxies with equatorial scattering: black hole masses and broad-line region characteristics
TL;DR: In this article, the spectropolarimetric observations of a sample of 30 Type 1 AGNs and an analysis of the observed polarization in these AGNs have been performed with the 6-meter telescope of SAO RAS using the modified SCORPIO-2 spectropholarimeter.
Journal ArticleDOI
Supermassive black holes with high accretion rates in active galactic nuclei. XI. Accretion disk reverberation mapping of Mrk 142
Edward M. Cackett,Jonathan Gelbord,Yan-Rong Li,Keith Horne,Jian-Min Wang,Aaron J. Barth,Jin-Ming Bai,Wei-Hao Bian,Russell W. Carroll,Pu Du,Rick Edelson,Michael R. Goad,Luis C. Ho,Chen Hu,Viraja Khatu,Bin Luo,Jake Miller,Ye-Fei Yuan +17 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors performed an intensive accretion disk reverberation mapping campaign on the high accretion rate active galactic nucleus Mrk 142 in early 2019 and measured significant time lags between the different wavelength light curves, finding that through the UV and optical the wavelength-dependent lags, τ(λ), generally follow the relation τ (λ)∝λ4/3, as expected for theT∝R−3/4profile of a steady-state optically-thick, geometrically-thin disk, though can also be fit by τ
Journal ArticleDOI
Correlated X-ray/ultraviolet/optical variability in NGC 6814
Jon S. Troyer,D. A. Starkey,Edward M. Cackett,Misty C. Bentz,Michael R. Goad,Keith Horne,James Seals +6 more
TL;DR: The LT is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.
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