Census of Black Hole Accretion Structure and Mass
ORAL · Invited
Abstract
Reliable measurements of black hole mass and accretion-disk structure are critical to understanding the growth history of black holes and galaxy evolution over cosmic time. Beyond the local universe, the gold standard for black hole mass and accretion-disk structure measurement is reverberation mapping, a technique that uses light echoes to measure the distance between the black-hole accretion disk and the gas clouds in the broad-line region. I will present the latest results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project and show how it has transformed our understanding of supermassive black holes by dramatically expanding the number of quasars with reliable mass and accretion structure at z > 0.3. I will also present a promising new method for reliably measuring mass and accretion structure of early black holes using direct accretion-disk structure measurement from future massive time-domain quasar studies with SDSS-V and the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
*Eberly College of Science at Penn State University
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Publication: Homayouni, Y., Yuanzhe Jiang, Brandt, W. N., et al., 2024, "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Insights on Maximizing Efficiency in Lag Measurements and Black-Hole Masses'', Submitted to ApJ
Shen, Y., Grier, C. J., Horne, K., et al. "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Key Results", ApJ 272, 26
Homayouni, Y., Trump, J. R., Grier, C. J., et al. 2020, "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: MgII Lag Results from Four years of Monitoring", ApJ, 901, 55
Presenters
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Yasaman Homayouni
- Penn State University