Medium-band Photometry Reverberation Mapping of Nearby Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that medium-band photometry with small telescopes can effectively perform reverberation mapping of nearby active galactic nuclei, providing a cost-effective alternative to traditional spectroscopic methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a medium-band photometric approach to reverberation mapping, enabling smaller telescopes to measure AGN broad-line region sizes efficiently.

Findings

Medium-band photometry yields consistent time lag measurements with spectroscopic RM.

A 0.43 m telescope can perform RM on nearby AGNs with days to weeks variability.

Potential to extend RM to tens of thousands of AGNs with 1 m class telescopes.

Abstract

Reverberation mapping (RM) is one of the most efficient ways to investigate the broad-line region around the central supermassive black holes of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). A common way of performing the RM is to perform a long term spectroscopic monitoring of AGNs, but the spectroscopic monitoring campaign of a large number of AGNs requires an extensive amount of observing time of medium to large size telescopes. As an alternative way, we present the results of photometric RM with medium-band photometry. As the widths of medium-band filters match well with the widths of AGN broad emission lines, the medium-band observation with small telescopes can be a cost-effective way to perform RM. We monitored five nearby AGNs with available spectroscopic RM results showing days to weeks scale variability. Observations were performed for ~3 months with an average of 3 days cadence using three medium-band filters on a 0.43 m telescope. The time lags between the continuum and the H-alpha emission line light curves are calculated using the JAVELIN software and the discrete correlation function. We find time lags of 1.5-15.9 days for these AGNs, which are consistent with the time lags derived from previous spectroscopic RM measurements. This result demonstrates that even a 0.5 m class telescope can perform RM with medium-bands. Furthermore, we show that RM for tens of thousands AGNs is possible with a dedicated 1 m class telescope.