No Arabic abstract
We developed a spectroscopic monitoring project to investigate the kinematics of the broad-line region (BLR) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) with ultra-fast outflows (UFOs). Mrk~79 is a radio-quiet AGN with UFOs and warm absorbers, had been monitored by three reverberation mapping (RM) campaigns, but its BLR kinematics is not understood yet. In this paper, we report the results from a new RM-campaign of Mrk~79, which was undertaken by Lijiang 2.4-m telescope. Mrk~79 is seeming to come out the faint state, the mean flux approximates a magnitude fainter than historical record. We successfully measured the lags of the broad emission lines including H$beta~lambda4861$, H$gamma~lambda4340$, He II $lambda4686$ and He I $lambda5876$ with respect to the varying AGN continuum. Based on the broad H$beta~lambda4861$ line, we measured black hole (BH) mass of $M_{bullet}=5.13^{+1.57}_{-1.55}times10^{7}M_{odot}$, estimated accretion rates of ${dot{M}_{bullet}}=(0.05pm0.02)~L_{rm Edd}~c^{-2}$, indicating that Mrk~79 is a sub-Eddington accretor. We found that Mrk~79 deviates from the canonical Radius$-$Luminosity relationship. The marginal blueshift of the broad He II $lambda4686$ line detected from rms spectrum indicates outflow of high-ionization gas. The velocity-resolved lag profiles of the broad H$gamma~lambda4340$, H$beta~lambda4861$, and He I $lambda5876$ lines show similar signatures that the largest lag occurs in the red wing of the lines then the lag decreases to both sides. These signatures should suggest that the BLR of Keplerian motion probably exists the outflow gas motion. All findings including UFOs, warm absorbers, and the kinematics of high- and low-ionization BLR, may provide an indirect evidence that the BLR of Mrk~79 probably originates from disk wind.
It has been recently proposed that the broad line region in active galactic nuclei originates from dusty clouds driven from the accretion disk by radiation pressure, at a distance from the black hole where the disk is cooler than the dust sublimation temperature. We test this scenario by checking the consistency of independent broad line region and accretion disk reverberation measurements, for a sample of 11 well studied active galactic nuclei. We show that independent disk and broad line region reverberation mapping measurements are compatible with a universal disk temperature at the H{beta} radius of T[R(H{beta})]=1670(231) K which is close to typical dust sublimation temperatures.
Broad emission lines in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) mainly arise from gas photoionized by continuum radiation from an accretion disk around a central black hole. The shape of the broad-line profile, described by ${cal D}_{_{rm Hbeta}}={rm FWHM}/sigma_{_{rm Hbeta}}$, the ratio of full width at half maximum to the dispersion of broad H$beta$, reflects the dynamics of the broad-line region (BLR) and correlates with the dimensionless accretion rate ($dot{mathscr{M}}$) or Eddington ratio ($L_{rm bol}/L_{rm Edd}$). At the same time, $dot{mathscr{M}}$ and $L_{rm bol}/L_{rm Edd}$ correlate with ${cal R}_{rm Fe}$, the ratio of optical Fe II to H$beta$ line flux emission. Assembling all AGNs with reverberation mapping measurements of broad H$beta$, both from the literature and from new observations reported here, we find a strong bivariate correlation of the form $log(dot{mathscr{M}},L_{rm bol}/L_{rm Edd})=alpha+beta{cal D}_{_{rm Hbeta}}+gamma{cal R}_{rm Fe},$ where $alpha=(2.47,0.31)$, $beta=-(1.59,0.82)$ and $gamma=(1.34,0.80)$. We refer to this as the fundamental plane of the BLR. We apply the plane to a sample of $z < 0.8$ quasars to demonstrate the prevalence of super-Eddington accreting AGNs are quite common at low redshifts.
Recent X-ray observations show absorbing winds with velocities up to mildly-relativistic values of the order of ~0.1c in a limited sample of 6 broad-line radio galaxies. They are observed as blue-shifted Fe XXV-XXVI K-shell absorption lines, similarly to the ultra-fast outflows (UFOs) reported in Seyferts and quasars. In this work we extend the search for such Fe K absorption lines to a larger sample of 26 radio-loud AGNs observed with XMM-Newton and Suzaku. The sample is drawn from the Swift BAT 58-month catalog and blazars are excluded. X-ray bright FR II radio galaxies constitute the majority of the sources. Combining the results of this analysis with those in the literature we find that UFOs are detected in >27% of the sources. However, correcting for the number of spectra with insufficient signal-to-noise, we can estimate that the incidence of UFOs is this sample of radio-loud AGNs is likely in the range f=(50+/-20)%. A photo-ionization modeling of the absorption lines with XSTAR allows to estimate the distribution of their main parameters. The observed outflow velocities are broadly distributed between v_out<1,000 km s^-1 and v_out~0.4c, with mean and median values of v_out~0.133c and v_out~0.117c, respectively. The material is highly ionized, with an average ionization parameter of logxi~4.5 erg s^-1 cm, and the column densities are larger than N_H > 10^22 cm^-2. Overall, these characteristics are consistent with the presence of complex accretion disk winds in a significant fraction of radio-loud AGNs and demonstrate that the presence of relativistic jets does not preclude the existence of winds, in accordance with several theoretical models.
Most results of the reverberation monitoring of active galaxies showed a universal scaling of the time delay of the Hbeta emission region with the monochromatic flux at 5100 A, with very small dipersion. Such a scaling favored the dust-based formation mechanism of the Broad Line Region (BLR). Recent reverberation measurements showed that actually a significant fraction of objects exhibits horter lags than the previously found scaling. Here we demonstrate that these shorter lags can be explained by the old concept of scaling of the BLR size with the ionization parameter. Assuming a universal value of this parameter and universal value of the cloud density reproduces the distribution of observational points in the time delay vs. monochromatic flux plane, provided that a range of black hole spins is allowed. However, a confirmation of the new measurements for low/moderate Eddington ratio sources is strongly needed before the dust-based origin of the BLR can be excluded.
Apart from viewing-dependent obscuration, intrinsic broad-line emission from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) follows an evolutionary sequence: Type $1 to 1.2/1.5 to 1.8/1.9 to 2$ as the accretion rate onto the central black hole is decreasing. This spectral evolution is controlled, at least in part, by the parameter $L_{rm bol}/M^{2/3}$, where $L_{rm bol}$ is the AGN bolometric luminosity and $M$ is the black hole mass. Both this dependence and the double-peaked profiles that emerge along the sequence arise naturally in the disk-wind scenario for the AGN broad-line region.