THE STRUCTURE OF THE BROAD-LINE REGION IN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI. I. RECONSTRUCTED VELOCITY-DELAY MAPS

By C. Grier, B. Peterson, K. Horne, M. Bentz, R. Pogge, K. Denney, G. D. Rosa, P. Martini, C. Kochanek, Y. Zu and 31 more. 2012

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present velocity-resolved reverberation results for five active galactic nuclei. We recovered velocity-delay maps using the maximum entropy method for four objects: Mrk 335, Mrk 1501, 3C 120, and PG 2130+099. For the fifth, Mrk 6, we were only able to measure mean time delays in different velocity bins of the Hβ emission line. The four velocity-delay maps show unique dynamical signatures for each object. For 3C 120, the Balmer lines show kinematic signatures consistent with both an inclined disk and infalling gas, but the He ii λ4686 emission line is suggestive only of inflow. The Balmer lines in Mrk 335, Mrk 1501, and PG 2130+099 show signs of infalling gas, but the He ii emission in Mrk 335 is consistent with an inclined disk. We also see tentative evidence of combined virial motion and infalling gas from the velocity-binned analysis of Mrk 6. The maps for 3C 120 and Mrk 335 are two of the most clearly defined velocity-delay maps to date. These maps constitute a large increase in the number of objects for which we have resolved velocity-delay maps and provide evidence supporting the reliability of reverberation-based black hole mass measurements.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/942656573855f555892267abf36c94a0e1eff1ef

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Citations in the corpus

STELLAR VELOCITY DISPERSION MEASUREMENTS IN HIGH-LUMINOSITY QUASAR HOSTS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE AGN BLACK HOLE MASS SCALE (2013, methodology): “The method has since been successfully used to improve RM measurements (Grier et al. 2012; Dietrich et al. 2012) and even recover velocity-delay maps (Grier et al. 2013).”
REVERBERATION MEASUREMENTS OF THE INNER RADIUS OF THE DUST TORUS IN 17 SEYFERT GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “…we applied an alternative method for measuring lag times developed by Zu et al. (2011), the JAVELIN software (formerly known as SPEAR), which is employed in recent reverberation studies (Grier et al. 2012a,b; Dietrich et al. 2012; Grier et al. 2013; Zhang 2013a,b; Shapovalova et al. 2013).”
THE LOW-LUMINOSITY END OF THE RADIUS–LUMINOSITY RELATIONSHIP FOR ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2013, methodology): “Furthermore, Grier et al. (2013) were able to reconstruct a map of the time-delay response as a function of velocity across the emission-line profile using the light curves presented by Grier et al. (2012).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT: TECHNICAL OVERVIEW (2014, methodology): “To further demonstrate that a detection is possible with as few as ∼15 epochs, we examine the observed LCs for the quasar 3C 120 in Grier et al. (2012).”
THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: X-RAYS DRIVE THE UV THROUGH NIR VARIABILITY IN THE 2013 ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS OUTBURST IN NGC 2617 (2013, unknown): “Assumingf = 4.31±1.05 (Grier et al. 2013a) and using the Hβ σline estimate from the RMS spectrum, we obtainMBH = (4±1)×107 M⊙.”
Measuring the Masses of Supermassive Black Holes (2014, background): “…a consortium of astronomers primarily in eastern Europe, Mexico, and Germany (e.g., Shapovalova et al. 2010; Popović et al. 2011; Shapovalova et al. 2012) and by the author’s group of collaborators (Bentz et al. 2006b; Denney et al. 2006; Bentz et al. 2007; Denney et al. 2010; Grier et al. 2012b).”
X-ray reverberation around accreting black holes (2014, background): “Such work has culminated in the measurement of black hole masses for a wide range of AGN (e.g. Grier et al. 2012 and see Peterson & Bentz 2006 for a review) and is now leading to the measurement of the detailed structure of the BLR, identifying its inclination to the observer as well as whether the…”