Abstract
Here we investigate the connection of broad emission line shapes and continuum light curve variability time scales of type-1 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). We developed a new model to describe optical broad emission lines as an accretion disk model of a line profile with additional ring emission. We connect ring radii with orbital time scales derived from optical light curves, and using Kepler's third law, we calculate mass of central supermassive black hole (SMBH). The obtained results for central black hole masses are in a good agreement with {other methods. This indicates that the variability time scales of AGN may not be stochastic, but rather connected to the orbital time scales which depend on the central SMBH mass.
Highlights
Type-1 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are very powerful and variable emitters
In case we could identify more one variability time scale period in the light curves that could be linked to the radius of an emitting ring in the broad emission line profile, for each ring-radius pair we should expect to obtain the same mass of the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) using Kepler’s laws
In order to test this our model interpretation of the BEL profiles, we performed a case study of Arp 102B because it is wellknown for its broad emission lines with double peaked shape that was already proposed to correspond to the accretion disk (AD) emission profile (Chen and Halpern, 1989; Chen et al, 1989; Sulentic et al, 1990; Eracleous and Halpern, 1994; Antonucci et al, 1996; Newman et al, 1997; Sergeev et al, 2000; Gezari et al, 2007; Jovanovicet al., 2010; Popovicet al., 2014)
Summary
Type-1 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are very powerful and variable emitters. The continuum emission in radio-quiet AGN is assumed to originate mainly from an accretion disk (AD) around a central supermassive black hole (SMBH) (Lynden-Bell, 1969; Shakura and Sunyaev, 1973). Reverberation mapping campaigns are based on this fact, and they measure time lags of correlated light curves in order to determine the sizes of reverberating region (which are after used for determination of central BH masses) in AGN (see e.g., Peterson, 1997; Kaspi et al, 2000; Peterson et al, 2002; Denney et al, 2009). The correlation of light curves might indicate that the signature of the main driver of the variability could be detected in the shape of the broad emission line profiles. This could give us the velocity resolved information about processes that drive the variability
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