The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Hα and Hβ Reverberation Measurements from First-year Spectroscopy and Photometry

By C. Grier, J. Trump, Yue Shen, K. Horne, K. Kinemuchi, I. McGreer, D. Starkey, W. N. Brandt, P. Hall, C. Kochanek and 32 more. 2017

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present reverberation mapping results from the first year of combined spectroscopic and photometric observations of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project. We successfully recover reverberation time delays between the g+i band emission and the broad Hβ emission line for a total of 44 quasars, and for the broad Hα emission line in 18 quasars. Time delays are computed using the JAVELIN and CREAM software and the traditional interpolated cross-correlation function (ICCF): using well-defined criteria, we report measurements of 32 Hβ and 13 Hα lags with JAVELIN, 42 Hβ and 17 Hα lags with CREAM, and 16 Hβ and eight Hα lags with the ICCF. Lag values are generally consistent among the three methods, though we typically measure smaller uncertainties with JAVELIN and CREAM than with the ICCF, given the more physically motivated light curve interpolation and more robust statistical modeling of the former two methods. The median redshift of our Hβ-detected sample of quasars is 0.53, significantly higher than that of the previous reverberation mapping sample. We find that in most objects, the time delay of the Hα emission is consistent with or slightly longer than that of Hβ. We measure black hole masses using our measured time delays and line widths for these quasars. These black hole mass measurements are mostly consistent with expectations based on the local – relationship, and are also consistent with single-epoch black hole mass measurements. This work increases the current sample size of reverberation-mapped active galaxies by about two-thirds and represents the first large sample of reverberation mapping observations beyond the local universe (z < 0.3).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/852dda220b0ff4fdfdcadbb8d745713e098061c7

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Citations in the corpus

Supermassive Black Holes with High Accretion Rates in Active Galactic Nuclei. IX. 10 New Observations of Reverberation Mapping and Shortened Hβ Lags (2018, methodology): “…et al. 1993, 1998, 2002, 2004; Kaspi et al. 2000, 2007; Bentz et al. 2008, 2009; Denney et al. 2009; Barth et al. 2011, 2013, 2015; Rafter et al. 2011, 2013; Grier et al. 2012, 2017; Du et al. 2014, 2015, 2016b; Wang et al. 2014a; Jiang et al. 2016; Shen et al. 2016; Fausnaugh et al. 2017).”
Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from two decades of spectroscopic surveys at the Apache Point Observatory (2020, background): “…Identification of Lensing Objects (SILO) VAC: https://data.sdss.org/sas/dr16/eboss/spectro/lensing/silo to the continuum for Hα (17 quasars; Grier et al. 2017), Hβ (42 quasars; Grier et al. 2017), Mg II (57 quasars; Homayouni et al. 2020), and C IV (52 quasars, in the redshift range 1.4 <…”
The Fifteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release of MaNGA-derived Quantities, Data Visualization Tools, and Stellar Library (2018, methodology): “The Black Hole Mapper will use the BOSS spectrographs to measure masses for∼1200 supermassive black holes via reverberation mapping (e.g. Grier et al. 2017), determine spectral variability for ∼25,000 quasars, and provide identifications and redshifts for ∼400,000 X-ray sources detected by eROSITA…”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Sample Characterization (2018, methodology): “The multiplex capability of SDSS-RM greatly improves the efficiency of RM, and our 2014 data set already led to lag detections that expand the redshift-luminosity range of RM measurements (e.g., Shen et al. 2016a; Li et al. 2017; Grier et al. 2017).”