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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2(934), p. L37, 2022

DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac7e54

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Optical Continuum Reverberation in the Dwarf Seyfert Nucleus of NGC 4395

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Abstract In order to constrain the size of the optical continuum emission region in the dwarf Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 4395 through reverberation mapping, we carried out high-cadence photometric monitoring in the griz filter bands on two consecutive nights in 2022 April using the four-channel MuSCAT3 camera on the Faulkes Telescope North at Haleakalā Observatory. Correlated variability across the griz bands is clearly detected, and the r-, i-, and z-band light curves show lags of 7.72 − 1.09 + 1.01 , 14.16 − 1.25 + 1.22 , and 20.78 − 2.09 + 1.99 minutes with respect to the g band when measured using the full-duration light curves. When lags are measured for each night separately, the Night 2 data exhibit lower cross-correlation amplitudes and shorter lags than the Night 1 light curves. Using the full-duration lags, we find that the lag–wavelength relationship is consistent with the τ ∝ λ 4/3 dependence found for more luminous active galactic nuclei. Combining our results with continuum lags measured for other objects, the lag between g and z band scales with optical continuum luminosity as τ gz ∝ L 0.56±0.05, similar to the scaling of broad-line region size with luminosity, reinforcing recent evidence that diffuse continuum emission from the broad-line region may contribute substantially to optical continuum variability and reverberation lags.