Location
The Leonardo Event Center
Start Date
5-12-2015 12:00 PM
Description
We analyzed the feasibility of an observational program to efficiently and accurately estimate masses of central supermassive black holes hosted by Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). For the past 40 years, this has been accomplished using Rever-beration Mapping (RM), which generally entails months of observations of simultaneous photo-metric and spectroscopic data and large-telescope time, which must be proposed sometimes years in advance. Due to this barrier, less than 50 AGN have had RM applied. Our method modifies RM for moderately-sized telescopes, e.g. 0.9-m hosted by West Mountain Observatory. We present a feasibility study of our photometric RM method with the AGN NGC 5548. We found a black holes mass estimate MBH = 67.2 ± 2.2 × 106M (with f = 5.5) and a lag of τ ≈ 3.3 days
A Feasibility Study of Photometric Reverberation Mapping Using Meter-Class Telescopes
The Leonardo Event Center
We analyzed the feasibility of an observational program to efficiently and accurately estimate masses of central supermassive black holes hosted by Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). For the past 40 years, this has been accomplished using Rever-beration Mapping (RM), which generally entails months of observations of simultaneous photo-metric and spectroscopic data and large-telescope time, which must be proposed sometimes years in advance. Due to this barrier, less than 50 AGN have had RM applied. Our method modifies RM for moderately-sized telescopes, e.g. 0.9-m hosted by West Mountain Observatory. We present a feasibility study of our photometric RM method with the AGN NGC 5548. We found a black holes mass estimate MBH = 67.2 ± 2.2 × 106M (with f = 5.5) and a lag of τ ≈ 3.3 days