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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project : accretion disk sizes from continuum lags

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Homayouni_2019_ApJ_880_126.pdf (2.062Mb)
Date
01/08/2019
Author
Homayouni, Y.
Trump, Jonathan R.
Grier, C. J.
Shen, Yue
Starkey, D. A.
Brandt, W. N.
Alvarez, G. Fonseca
Hall, P. B.
Horne, Keith
Kinemuchi, Karen
Li, Jennifer I-Hsiu
McGreer, Ian D.
Sun, Mouyuan
Ho, L. C.
Schneider, D. P.
Keywords
Accretion, accretion disks
Galaxies: active
Galaxies: nuclei
Quasars: general
QB Astronomy
NDAS
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Abstract
We present accretion disk structure measurements from continuum lags in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. Lags are measured using the JAVELIN software from the first-year SDSS-RM g and i photometry, resulting in well-defined lags for 95 quasars, 33 of which have lag S/N > 2σ. We also estimate lags using the ICCF software and find consistent results, though with larger uncertainties. Accretion disk structure is fit using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach, parameterizing the measured continuum lags as a function of disk size normalization, wavelength, black hole mass, and luminosity. In contrast with previous observations, our best-fit disk sizes and color profiles are consistent (within 1.5σ) with the Shakura & Sunyaev analytic solution. We also find that more massive quasars have larger accretion disks, similarly consistent with the analytic accretion disk model. The data are inconclusive on a correlation between disk size and continuum luminosity, with results that are consistent with both no correlation and the Shakura & Sunyaev expectation. The continuum lag fits have a large excess dispersion, indicating that our measured lag errors are underestimated and/or our best-fit model may be missing the effects of orientation, spin, and/or radiative efficiency. We demonstrate that fitting disk parameters using only the highest-S/N lag measurements biases best-fit disk sizes to be larger than the disk sizes recovered using a Bayesian approach on the full sample of well-defined lags.
Citation
Homayouni , Y , Trump , J R , Grier , C J , Shen , Y , Starkey , D A , Brandt , W N , Alvarez , G F , Hall , P B , Horne , K , Kinemuchi , K , Li , J I-H , McGreer , I D , Sun , M , Ho , L C & Schneider , D P 2019 , ' The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project : accretion disk sizes from continuum lags ' , Astrophysical Journal , vol. 880 , no. 2 , 126 . https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2638
Publication
Astrophysical Journal
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2638
ISSN
1538-4357
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2019 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2638
Description
K.H. acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/R000824/1
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08360
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18404

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