Modelling reverberation mapping data – II. Dynamical modelling of the Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2008 data set

By A. Pancoast, Brendon J. Brewer, T. Treu, Daeseong Park, A. Barth, M. Bentz, J. Woo. 2013

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Author(s): Pancoast, A; Brewer, BJ; Treu, T; Park, D; Barth, AJ; Bentz, MC; Woo, JH | Abstract: © 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We present dynamical modelling of the broad-line region (BLR) for a sample of five Seyfert 1 galaxies using reverberation mapping data taken by the Lick AGN Monitoring Project in 2008. By modelling the AGN continuum light curve and Hβ line profiles directly, we are able to constrain the geometry and kinematics of the BLR and make a measurement of the black hole mass that does not depend upon the virial factor, f, needed in traditional reverberation mapping analysis. We find that the geometry of the BLR is generally a thick disc viewed close to face-on. While the Hβ emission is found to come preferentially from the far side of the BLR, the mean size of the BLR is consistent with the lags measured with crosscorrelation analysis. The BLR kinematics are found to be consistent with either inflowing motions or elliptical orbits, often with some combination of the two. We measure black hole masses of log10(MBH/M⊙) = 6.62-0.13+0.10 for Arp 151, 7.42-0.27+0.26 for Mrk 1310, 7.59-0.21+0.24 for NGC 5548, 6.37-0.16+0.21 for NGC 6814, and 6.99-0.25+0.32 for SBS 1116+583A. The f factors measured individually for each AGN are found to correlate with inclination angle, although not with MBH, L5100, or FWHM/s of the emission line profile.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c17ba5003f6802d7d71c034c1314b6425d121b2e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT 2011: SPECTROSCOPIC CAMPAIGN AND EMISSION-LINE LIGHT CURVES (2015, methodology): “…light curves, measurements of broad-line lags and velocity-resolved reverberation using both cross-correlation and JAVELIN (Zu et al. 2011) methodology, black hole virial mass estimates, and BLR dynamical modeling using the methods described by Pancoast et al. (2011) and Pancoast et al. (2014a).”
SPACE TELESCOPE AND OPTICAL REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT. II. SWIFT AND HST REVERBERATION MAPPING OF THE ACCRETION DISK OF NGC 5548 (2015, unknown): “For NGC 5548 the current best mass estimate is MBH ∼ 3.2 × 107 M⊙ (Denney et al. 2010, Pancoast et al. 2014).”
Supermassive Black Holes with High Accretion Rates in Active Galactic Nuclei. IX. 10 New Observations of Reverberation Mapping and Shortened Hβ Lags (2018, background): “We took =icos 0.75 (see some discussions in Paper V), which is an average estimate for type I AGNs (e.g., Fischer et al. 2014; Pancoast et al. 2014).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT: TECHNICAL OVERVIEW (2014, methodology): “This virial hypothesis can be further tested with velocity-resolved RM results (e.g., Denney et al. 2009), or dynamical modeling of the structure and kinematics of the BLR with velocity-resolved RM data (e.g., Pancoast et al. 2012, 2014; Li et al. 2013).”