Broad-Line Region Characterization in Dozens of Active Galactic Nuclei Using Small-Aperture Telescopes

TL;DR

This study uses small telescopes over nearly a decade to perform photometric reverberation mapping of the Hα emission line in Seyfert galaxies, improving the understanding of the broad-line region and black hole properties.

Contribution

Introduces a new PRM formalism and provides high-quality Hα size-luminosity data for dozens of active galactic nuclei using small telescopes.

Findings

Robust delays measured for 33/80 objects, estimating BLR sizes.

Enhanced Hα size-luminosity relation with reduced scatter.

Black hole masses and accretion rates estimated from single-epoch spectra.

Abstract

We present the results of a nearly decade-long photometric reverberation mapping (PRM) survey of the H$\alpha$ emission line in nearby ($0.01\lesssim z \lesssim0.05$) Seyfert-Galaxies using small ($15\,\mathrm{cm}-40\,\mathrm{cm}$) telescopes. Broad-band filters were used to trace the continuum emission, while narrow-band filters tracked the H$\alpha$-line signal. We introduce a new PRM formalism to determine the time delay between continuum and line emission using combinations of auto- and cross-correlation functions. We obtain robust delays for 33/80 objects, allowing us to estimate the broad-line region (BLR) size. Additionally, we measure multi-epoch delays for 6 objects whose scatter per source is smaller than the scatter in the BLR size-luminosity relation. Our study enhances the existing H$\alpha$ size-luminosity relation by adding high-quality results for 31 objects, whose nuclear luminosities were estimated using the flux-variation gradient method, resulting in a scatter of 0.26dex within our sample. The scatter reduces to 0.17dex when the 6 lowest luminosity sources are discarded, which is comparable to that found for the H$\beta$ line. Single-epoch spectra enable us to estimate black hole masses using the H$\alpha$ line and derive mass accretion rates from the iron-blend feature adjacent to H$\beta$. A similar trend, as previously reported for the H$\beta$ line, is implied whereby highly accreting objects tend to lie below the size-luminosity relation of the general population. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of small telescopes in conducting high-fidelity PRM campaigns of prominent emission lines in bright active galactic nuclei.