The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Composite Lags at z ≤ 1
- Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 (United States)
- SUPA Physics/Astronomy, Univ. of St. Andrews, St. Andrews KY16 9SS (United Kingdom)
- Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802 (United States)
- Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
- Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing 100871 (China)
- Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 140 West 18th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, 2152 Hillside Road, Unit 3046, Storrs, CT 06269 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 (United States)
- Apache Point Observatory and New Mexico State University, P.O. Box 59, Sunspot, NM, 88349-0059 (United States)
We present composite broad-line region (BLR) reverberation mapping lag measurements for H α , H β , He ii λ 4686, and Mg ii for a sample of 144, z ≲ 1 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. Using only the 32-epoch spectroscopic light curves in the first six-month season of SDSS-RM observations, we compile correlation function measurements for individual objects and then coadd them to allow the measurement of the average lags for our sample at mean redshifts of 0.4 (for H α ) and ∼0.65 (for the other lines). At similar quasar luminosities and redshifts, the sample-averaged lag decreases in the order of Mg ii, H α , H β , and He ii. This decrease in lags is accompanied by an increase in the mean line width of the four lines, and is roughly consistent with the virialized motion for BLR gas in photoionization equilibrium. These are among the first RM measurements of stratified BLR structure at z > 0.3. Dividing our sample by luminosity, H α shows clear evidence of increasing lags with luminosity, consistent with the expectation from the measured BLR size–luminosity relation based on H β . The other three lines do not show a clear luminosity trend in their average lags due to the limited dynamic range of luminosity probed and the poor average correlation signals in the divided samples, a situation that will be improved with the incorporation of additional photometric and spectroscopic data from SDSS-RM. We discuss the utility and caveats of composite lag measurements for large statistical quasar samples with reverberation mapping data.
- OSTI ID:
- 22663158
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 846, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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