THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT: PHOTOMETRIC LIGHT CURVES AND OPTICAL VARIABILITY CHARACTERISTICS

Journal Article · Sun Nov 01 04:00:00 EST 2009 · Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0067-0049/185/1/156; COUNTRY OF INPUT: INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY (IAEA)· OSTI ID:21301524

Walsh, Jonelle L; Bentz, Misty C; Barth, Aaron J ^[1]; Minezaki, Takeo; Sakata, Yu; Yoshii, Yuzuru ^[2]; Baliber, Nairn; Bennert, Vardha Nicola; Street, Rachel A; Treu, Tommaso ^[3]; Weidong, Li; Filippenko, Alexei V ^[4]; Stern, Daniel ^[5]; Brown, Timothy M ^[6]; Canalizo, Gabriela ^[7]; Gates, Elinor L ^[8]; Greene, Jenny E ^[9]; Malkan, Matthew A; Woo, Jong-Hak ^[10]

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1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California at Irvine, 4129 Frederick Reines Hall, Irvine, CA 92697-4574 (United States)
2. Institute of Astronomy, School of Science, University of Tokyo, 2-21-1 Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-0015 (Japan)
3. Physics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 (United States)
4. Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3411 (United States)
5. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, MS 169-527, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
6. Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, 6740 Cortona Dr. Ste. 102, Goleta, CA 93117 (United States)
7. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521 (United States)
8. Lick Observatory, P.O. Box 85, Mount Hamilton, CA 95140 (United States)
9. Princeton University Observatory, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
10. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024 (United States)

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project targeted 13 nearby Seyfert 1 galaxies with the intent of measuring the masses of their central black holes using reverberation mapping. The sample includes 12 galaxies selected to have black holes with masses roughly in the range 10{sup 6}-10{sup 7} M {sub sun}, as well as the well-studied active galactic nucleus (AGN) NGC 5548. In conjunction with a spectroscopic monitoring campaign, we obtained broadband B and V images on most nights from 2008 February through 2008 May. The imaging observations were carried out by four telescopes: the 0.76 m Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope, the 2 m Multicolor Active Galactic Nuclei Monitoring telescope, the Palomar 60 inch (1.5 m) telescope, and the 0.80 m Tenagra II telescope. Having well-sampled light curves over the course of a few months is useful for obtaining the broad-line reverberation lag and black hole mass, and also allows us to examine the characteristics of the continuum variability. In this paper, we discuss the observational methods and the photometric measurements, and present the AGN continuum light curves. We measure various variability characteristics of each of the light curves. We do not detect any evidence for a time lag between the B- and V-band variations, and we do not find significant color variations for the AGNs in our sample.

• OSTI ID: 21301524
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 185; ISSN 0067-0049; ISSN APJSA2
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
BLACK HOLES
COLOR
GALAXIES
GALAXY NUCLEI
IMAGES
MAPPING
MASS
TELESCOPES