THE LICK AGN MONITORING PROJECT 2011: SPECTROSCOPIC CAMPAIGN AND EMISSION-LINE LIGHT CURVES
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, 4129 Frederick Reines Hall, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697-4575 (United States)
- Physics Department, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3411 (United States)
- Lick Observatory, P.O. Box 85, Mount Hamilton, CA 95140 (United States)
- Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1547 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 (United States)
- Texas Tech University, Physics Department, Box 41051, Lubbock, TX 79409-1051 (United States)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
- Astronomy Program, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742 (Korea, Republic of)
- Núcleo de Astronomía de la Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Diego Portales, Av. Ejército Libertador 441, Santiago (Chile)
- Department of Astronomy and Center for Galaxy Evolution Research, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749 (Korea, Republic of)
- Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142 (New Zealand)
- Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MC 661, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
In the Spring of 2011 we carried out a 2.5 month reverberation mapping campaign using the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory, monitoring 15 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies. This paper describes the observations, reductions and measurements, and data products from the spectroscopic campaign. The reduced spectra were fitted with a multicomponent model in order to isolate the contributions of various continuum and emission-line components. We present light curves of broad emission lines and the active galactic nucleus (AGN) continuum, and measurements of the broad Hβ line widths in mean and rms spectra. For the most highly variable AGNs we also measured broad Hβ line widths and velocity centroids from the nightly spectra. In four AGNs exhibiting the highest variability amplitudes, we detect anticorrelations between broad Hβ width and luminosity, demonstrating that the broad-line region “breathes” on short timescales of days to weeks in response to continuum variations. We also find that broad Hβ velocity centroids can undergo substantial changes in response to continuum variations; in NGC 4593, the broad Hβ velocity shifted by ∼250 km s{sup −1} over a 1 month period. This reverberation-induced velocity shift effect is likely to contribute a significant source of confusion noise to binary black hole searches that use multi-epoch quasar spectroscopy to detect binary orbital motion. We also present results from simulations that examine biases that can occur in measurement of broad-line widths from rms spectra due to the contributions of continuum variations and photon-counting noise.
- OSTI ID:
- 22520084
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Vol. 217, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0067-0049
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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