No Arabic abstract
We report results of the first reverberation mapping campaign of I Zwicky 1 during $2014$-$2016$, which showed unambiguous reverberations of the broad H$beta$ line emission to the varying optical continuum. From analysis using several methods, we obtain a reverberation lag of $tau_{rm Hbeta}=37.2^{+4.5}_{-4.9},$ days. Taking a virial factor of $f_{_{rm BLR}}=1$, we find a black hole mass of $M_{bullet}=9.30_{-1.38}^{+1.26}times 10^6 M_{odot}$ from the mean spectra. The accretion rate is estimated to be $203.9_{-65.8}^{+61.0},L_{rm Edd}c^{-2}$, suggesting a super-Eddington accretor, where $L_{rm Edd}$ is the Eddington luminosity and $c$ is the speed of light. By decomposing {it Hubble Space Telescope} images, we find that the stellar mass of the bulge of its host galaxy is $log (M_{rm bulge}/M_{odot}) = rm 10.92pm 0.07$. This leads to a black hole to bulge mass ratio of $sim 10^{-4}$, which is significantly smaller than that of classical bulges and elliptical galaxies. After subtracting the host contamination from the observed luminosity, we find that I Zw 1 follows the empirical $R_{rm BLR}propto L_{5100}^{1/2}$ relation.
I Zwicky 1 is the prototype optical narrow line Seyfert 1 galaxy. It is also a nearby ($z=0.0611$), luminous QSO, accreting close to the Eddington limit. XMM-Newton observations of I Zw 1 in 2015 reveal the presence of a broad and blueshifted P-Cygni iron K profile, as observed through a blue-shifted absorption trough at 9 keV and a broad excess of emission at 7 keV in the X-ray spectra. The profile can be well fitted with a wide angle accretion disk wind, with an outflow velocity of at least $-0.25c$. In this respect, I Zw 1 may be an analogous to the prototype fast wind detected in the QSO, PDS 456, while its overall mass outflow rate is scaled down by a factor $times50$ due to its lower black hole mass. The mechanical power of the fast wind in I Zw 1 is constrained to within $5-15$% of Eddington, while its momentum rate is of the order unity. Upper-limits placed on the energetics of any molecular outflow, from its CO profile measured by IRAM, appear to rule out the presence of a powerful, large scale, energy conserving wind in this AGN. We consider whether I Zw 1 may be similar to a number of other AGN, such as PDS 456, where the large scale galactic outflow is much weaker than what is anticipated from models of energy conserving feedback.
A large reverberation mapping study of the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 7469 has yielded emission-line lags for Hbeta 4861 and He II 4686 and a central black hole mass measurement of about 10 million solar masses, consistent with previous measurements. A very low level of variability during the monitoring campaign precluded meeting our original goal of recovering velocity-delay maps from the data, but with the new Hbeta measurement, NGC 7469 is no longer an outlier in the relationship between the size of the Hbeta-emitting broad-line region and the AGN luminosity. It was necessary to detrend the continuum and Hbeta and He II 4686 line light curves and those from archival UV data for different time-series analysis methods to yield consistent results.
We present new observations leading to an improved black hole mass estimate for the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 4593 as part of a reverberation-mapping campaign conducted at the MDM Observatory. Cross-correlation analysis of the H_beta emission-line light curve with the optical continuum light curve reveals an emission-line time delay of 3.73 (+-0.75) days. By combining this time delay with the H_beta line width, we derive a central black hole mass of M_BH = 9.8(+-2.1)x10^6 M_sun, an improvement in precision of a factor of several over past results.
Narrow line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) are believed to be powered by accretion of matter onto low mass black holes (BHs) in spiral host galaxies with BH masses M_BH of 10^6 - 10^8 M_sun . However, the broad band spectral energy distribution of the gamma-ray emitting NLS1s are found to be similar to flat spectrum radio quasars. This challenges our current notion of NLS1s having low M_BH . To resolve this tension of low M_BH values in NLS1s, we fitted the observed optical spectrum of a sample of radio-loud NLS1s (RL-NLS1s), radio-quiet NLS1s (RQ-NLS1s) and radio-quiet broad line Seyfert 1 galaxies (RQ-BLS1s) of about 500 each with the standard Shakura-Sunyaev accretion disk (AD) model. For RL-NLS1s we found a mean log(M_ADBH/M_sun) of 7.98 +/- 0.54. For RQ-NLS1s and RQ-BLS1s we found mean log(M_ADBH/M_sun) of 8.00 +/- 0.43 and 7.90 +/- 0.57, respectively. While the derived M_BH values of RQ-BLS1s are similar to their virial masses, for NLS1s the derived M_ADBH values are about an order of magnitude larger than their virial estimates. Our analysis thus indicates that NLS1s have M_BH similar to RQ-BLS1s and their available virial M_BH values are underestimated influenced by their observed relatively small emission line widths. Considering Eddington ratio as an estimation of the accretion rate and using M_ADBH, we found the mean accretion rate of our RQ-NLS1s, RL-NLS1s and RQ-BLS1s as 0.06 (+0.16, -0.05), 0.05 (+0.18, -0.04) and 0.05 (+0.15, -0.04) respectively. Our results therefore suggest that NLS1s have BH masses and accretion rates similar to BLS1s.
Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies have been identified by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope as a rare class of gamma-ray emitting active galactic nuclei (AGN). The lowest-redshift candidate among them is the source 1H 0323+342. Here we present quasi-simultaneous Gemini near-infrared and Keck optical spectroscopy for it, from which we derive a black hole mass based on both the broad Balmer and Paschen emission lines. We supplement these observations with a NuSTAR X-ray spectrum taken about two years earlier, from which we constrain the black hole mass based on the short timescale spectral variability. Our multiwavelength observations suggest a black hole mass of ~2x10^7 solar masses, which agrees well with previous estimates. We build the spectral energy distribution and show that it is dominated by the thermal and reprocessed emission from the accretion disc rather than the non-thermal jet component. A detailed spectral fitting with the energy-conserving accretion disc model of Done et al. constrains the Eddington ratio to L/L_Edd ~ 0.5 for a (non-rotating) Schwarzschild black hole and to L/L_Edd ~ 1 for a Kerr black hole with dimensionless spin of a*=0.8. Higher spin values and so higher Eddington ratios are excluded, since they would strongly overpredict the observed soft X-ray flux.