22 research outputs found
Serological biomarker testing helps avoiding unnecessary endoscopies in obese patients before bariatric surgery
Evolution of active galactic nuclei
[Abriged] Supermassive black holes (SMBH) lurk in the nuclei of most massive
galaxies, perhaps in all of them. The tight observed scaling relations between
SMBH masses and structural properties of their host spheroids likely indicate
that the processes fostering the growth of both components are physically
linked, despite the many orders of magnitude difference in their physical size.
This chapter discusses how we constrain the evolution of SMBH, probed by their
actively growing phases, when they shine as active galactic nuclei (AGN) with
luminosities often in excess of that of the entire stellar population of their
host galaxies. Following loosely the chronological developments of the field,
we begin by discussing early evolutionary studies, when AGN represented beacons
of light probing the most distant reaches of the universe and were used as
tracers of the large scale structure. This early study turned into AGN
"Demography", once it was realized that the strong evolution (in luminosity,
number density) of the AGN population hindered any attempt to derive
cosmological parameters from AGN observations directly. Following a discussion
of the state of the art in the study of AGN luminosity functions, we move on to
discuss the "modern" view of AGN evolution, one in which a bigger emphasis is
given to the physical relationships between the population of growing black
holes and their environment. This includes observational and theoretical
efforts aimed at constraining and understanding the evolution of scaling
relations, as well as the resulting limits on the evolution of the SMBH mass
function. Physical models of AGN feedback and the ongoing efforts to isolate
them observationally are discussed next. Finally, we touch upon the problem of
when and how the first black holes formed and the role of black holes in the
high-redshift universe.Comment: 75 pages, 35 figures. Modified version of the chapter accepted to
appear in "Planets, Stars and Stellar Systems", vol 6, ed W. Keel
(www.springer.com/astronomy/book/978-90-481-8818-5). The number of references
is limited upon request of the editors. Original submission to Springer: June
201
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The lick agn monitoring project 2011: Fe II reverberation from the outer broad-line region
The prominent broad Fe II emission blends in the spectra of active galactic nuclei have been shown to vary in response to continuum variations, but past attempts to measure the reverberation lag time of the optical Fe II lines have met with only limited success. Here we report the detection of Fe II reverberation in two Seyfert 1 galaxies, NGC 4593 and Mrk 1511, based on data from a program carried out at Lick Observatory in Spring 2011. Light curves for emission lines including Hβ and Fe II were measured by applying a fitting routine to decompose the spectra into several continuum and emission-line components, and we use cross-correlation techniques to determine the reverberation lags of the emission lines relative to V-band light curves. In both cases, the measured lag (τcen) of Fe II is longer than that of Hβ, although the inferred lags are somewhat sensitive to the choice of Fe II template used in the fit. For spectral decompositions done using the Fe II template of Véron-Cetty et al., we find τcen (Fe II)/τcen (Hβ) = 1.9 ± 0.6 in NGC 4593 and 1.5 ± 0.3 in Mrk 1511. The detection of highly correlated variations between Fe II and continuum emission demonstrates that the Fe II emission in these galaxies originates in photoionized gas, located predominantly in the outer portion of the broad-line region. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved
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THE lick AGN monitoring project 2011: Spectroscopic campaign and emission-line light curves
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-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
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The lick AGN monitoring project 2011: Dynamical modeling of the broad-line region in Mrk 50
We present dynamical modeling of the broad-line region (BLR) in the Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk 50 using reverberation mapping data taken as part of the Lick AGN Monitoring Project (LAMP) 2011. We model the reverberation mapping data directly, constraining the geometry and kinematics of the BLR, as well as deriving a black hole mass estimate that does not depend on a normalizing factor or virial coefficient. We find that the geometry of the BLR in Mrk 50 is a nearly face-on thick disk, with a mean radius of 9.6+1.2-0.9 light days, a width of the BLR of 6.9+1.2-1.1 light days, and a disk opening angle of 25 ± 10 deg above the plane. We also constrain the inclination angle to be 9+7-5 deg, close to face-on. Finally, the black hole mass of Mrk 50 is inferred to be log10(M BH/M = 7.57+0.44-0.27. By comparison to the virial black hole mass estimate from traditional reverberation mapping analysis, we find the normalizing constant (virial coefficient) to be log10 f = 0.78+0.44-0.27, consistent with the commonly adopted mean value of 0.74 based on aligning the M BH-σ* relation for active galactic nuclei and quiescent galaxies. While our dynamical model includes the possibility of a net inflow or outflow in the BLR, we cannot distinguish between these two scenarios. © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.