Search for: All records

Abstract We present the main results from a long-term reverberation mapping campaign carried out for the Seoul National University AGN Monitoring Project (SAMP). High-quality data were obtained during 2015–2021 for 32 luminous active galactic nuclei (AGNs; i.e., continuum luminosity in the range of 10^44–46erg s⁻¹) at a regular cadence, of 20–30 days for spectroscopy and 3–5 days for photometry. We obtain time lag measurements between the variability in the Hβemission and the continuum for 32 AGNs; 25 of those have the best lag measurements based on our quality assessment, examining correlation strength and the posterior lag distribution. Our study significantly increases the current sample of reverberation-mapped AGNs, particularly at the moderate-to-high-luminosity end. Combining our results with literature measurements, we derive an Hβbroadline region size–luminosity relation with a shallower slope than reported in the literature. For a given luminosity, most of our measured lags are shorter than the expectations, implying that single-epoch black hole mass estimators based on previous calibrations could suffer large systematic uncertainties. 

Abstract The broad-line region (BLR) size–luminosity relation has paramount importance for estimating the mass of black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Traditionally, the size of the H β BLR is often estimated from the optical continuum luminosity at 5100 Å, while the size of the H α BLR and its correlation with the luminosity is much less constrained. As a part of the Seoul National University AGN Monitoring Project, which provides 6 yr photometric and spectroscopic monitoring data, we present our measurements of the H α lags of high-luminosity AGNs. Combined with the measurements for 42 AGNs from the literature, we derive the size–luminosity relations of the H α BLR against the broad H α and 5100 Å continuum luminosities. We find the slope of the relations to be 0.61 ± 0.04 and 0.59 ± 0.04, respectively, which are consistent with the H β size–luminosity relation. Moreover, we find a linear relation between the 5100 Å continuum luminosity and the broad H α luminosity across 7 orders of magnitude. Using these results, we propose a new virial mass estimator based on the H α broad emission line, finding that the previous mass estimates based on scaling relations in the literature are overestimated by up to 0.7 dex at masses lower than 10 7 M ⊙ .