No Arabic abstract
We present V and R photometry of the gravitationally lensed quasars WFI2033-4723 and HE0047-1756. The data were taken by the MiNDSTEp collaboration with the 1.54 m Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla observatory from 2008 to 2012. Differential photometry has been carried out using the image subtraction method as implemented in the HOTPAnTS package, additionally using GALFIT for quasar photometry. The quasar WFI2033-4723 showed brightness variations of order 0.5 mag in V and R during the campaign. The two lensed components of quasar HE0047-1756 varied by 0.2-0.3 mag within five years. We provide, for the first time, an estimate of the time delay of component B with respect to A of $Delta t= 7.6pm1.8$ days for this object. We also find evidence for a secular evolution of the magnitude difference between components A and B in both filters, which we explain as due to a long-duration microlensing event. Finally we find that both quasars WFI2033-4723 and HE0047-1756 become bluer when brighter, which is consistent with previous studies.
We use single-epoch spectroscopy of three gravitationally lensed quasars, HE0435-1223, WFI2033-4723, and HE2149-2745, to study their inner structure (BLR and continuum source). We detect microlensing-induced magnification in the wings of the broad emission lines of two of the systems (HE0435-1223 and WFI2033-4723). In the case of WFI2033-4723, microlensing affects two bumps in the spectra which are almost symmetrically arranged on the blue (coincident with an AlIII emission line) and red wings of CIII]. These match the typical double-peaked profile that follows from disk kinematics. The presence of microlensing in the wings of the emission lines indicates the existence of two different regions in the BLR: a relatively small one with kinematics possibly related to an accretion disk, and another one that is substantially more extended and insensitive to microlensing. There is good agreement between the estimated size of the region affected by microlensing in the emission lines, $r_s=10^{+15}_{-7} sqrt{M/M_{odot}}$ light-days (red wing of CIV in HE0435-1223) and $r_s=11^{+28}_{-7} sqrt{M/M_{odot}}$ light-days (CIII] bumps in WFI2033-4723) with the sizes inferred from the continuum emission, $r_s=13^{+5}_{-4} sqrt{M/M_{odot}}$ light-days (HE0435-1223) and $r_s=10^{+3}_{-2} sqrt{M/M_{odot}}$ light-days (WFI2033-4723). For HE2149-2745 we measure an accretion disk size $r_s=8^{+11}_{-5} sqrt{M/M_{odot}}$ light-days. The estimates of $p$, the exponent of the size vs. wavelength ($r_sproptolambda^p$), are $1.2pm0.6$, $0.8pm0.2$, and $0.4pm0.3$ for HE0435-1223, WFI2033-4723, and HE2149-2745, respectively. In conclusion, the continuum microlensing amplitude in the three quasars and chromaticity in WFI2033-4723 and HE2149-2745 are below expectations for the thin disk model. The disks are larger and their temperature gradients are flatter than predicted by this model.
We present new measurements of the time delays of WFI2033-4723. The data sets used in this work include 14 years of data taken at the 1.2m Leonhard Euler Swiss telescope, 13 years of data from the SMARTS 1.3m telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and a single year of high-cadence and high-precision monitoring at the MPIA 2.2m telescope. The time delays measured from these different data sets, all taken in the R-band, are in good agreement with each other and with previous measurements from the literature. Combining all the time-delay estimates from our data sets results in Dt_AB = 36.2-0.8+0.7 days (2.1% precision), Dt_AC = -23.3-1.4+1.2 days (5.6%) and Dt_BC = -59.4-1.3+1.3 days (2.2%). In addition, the close image pair A1-A2 of the lensed quasars can be resolved in the MPIA 2.2m data. We measure a time delay consistent with zero in this pair of images. We also explore the prior distributions of microlensing time-delay potentially affecting the cosmological time-delay measurements of WFI2033-4723. There is however no strong indication in our measurements that microlensing time delay is neither present nor absent. This work is part of a H0LiCOW series focusing on measuring the Hubble constant from WFI2033-4723.
We present a new method of modelling time-series data based on the running optimal average (ROA). By identifying the effective number of parameters for the ROA model, in terms of the shape and width of its window function and the times and accuracies of the data, we enable a Bayesian analysis, optimising the ROA width, along with other model parameters, by minimising the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) and sampling joint posterior parameter distributions using MCMC methods. For analysis of quasar lightcurves, our implementation of ROA modelling can inter-calibrate lightcurve data from different telescopes, estimate the shape and thus the power-density spectrum of the lightcurve, and measure time delays among lightcurves at different wavelengths or from different images of a lensed quasar. Our noise model implements a robust treatment of outliers and error-bar adjustments to account for additional variance or poorly-quantified uncertainties. Tests with simulated data validate the parameter uncertainty estimates. We compare ROA delay measurements with results from cross-correlation and from JAVELIN, which models lightcurves with a prior on the power-density spectrum. We analyse published COSMOGRAIL lightcurves of multi-lensed quasar lightcurves and present the resulting measurements of the inter-image time delays and detection of microlensing effects.
The Chandra observations of several gravitationally lensed quasars show evidence for flux and spectral variability of the X-ray emission that is uncorrelated between images and is thought to result from the microlensing by stars in the lensing galaxy. We report here on the most detailed modeling of such systems to date, including simulations of the emission of the Fe K-alpha fluorescent radiation from the accretion disk with a general relativistic ray tracing code, the use of realistic microlensing magnification maps derived from inverse ray shooting calculations, and the simulation of the line detection biases. We use lensing and black hole parameters appropriate for the quadruply lensed quasar RX J1131-1231, and compare the simulated results with the observational results. The simulations cannot fully reproduce the distribution of the detected line energies indicating that some of the assumptions underlying the simulations are not correct, or that the simulations are missing some important physics. We conclude by discussing several possible explanations.
We present 13 seasons of $R$-band photometry of the quadruply-lensed quasar WFI 2033-4723 from the 1.3m SMARTS telescope at CTIO and the 1.2m Euler Swiss Telescope at La Silla, in which we detect microlensing variability of $sim0.2$ mags on a timescale of $sim$6 years. Using a Bayesian Monte Carlo technique, we analyze the microlensing signal to obtain a measurement of the size of this systems accretion disk of $log (r_s/{rm cm}) = 15.86^{+0.25}_{-0.27}$ at $lambda_{rest} = 2481{rm AA}$, assuming a $60^circ$ inclination angle. We confirm previous measurements of the BC and AB time delays, and we obtain a tentative measurement of the delay between the closely spaced A1 and A2 images of $Delta t_{A1A2} = t_{A1} - t_{A2} = -3.9^{+3.4}_{-2.2}$ days. We conclude with an update to the Quasar Accretion Disk Size - Black Hole Mass Relation, in which we confirm that the accretion disk size predictions from simple thin disk theory are too small.