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Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping Project. III. Optical Continuum Emission and Broad-Band Time Delays in NGC 5548

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

We present ground-based optical photometric monitoring data for NGC 5548, part of an extended multiwavelength reverberation mapping campaign. The light curves have nearly daily cadence from 2014 January to July in nine filters (BVRI and ugriz). Combined with ultraviolet data from the Hubble Space Telescope and Swift, we confirm significant time delays between the continuum bands as a function of wavelength, extending the wavelength coverage from 1158 Å to the z band (∼9160 Å). We find that the lags at wavelengths longer than the V band are equal to or greater than the lags of high-ionization-state emission lines (such as He II λ1640 and λ4686), suggesting that the continuum-emitting source is of a physical size comparable to the inner broad-line region (BLR). The trend of lag with wavelength is broadly consistent with the prediction for continuum reprocessing by an accretion disk with τ ∝ λ 4/3 . However, the lags also imply a disk radius that is 3 times larger than the prediction from standard thin-disk theory, assuming that the bolometric luminosity is 10% of the Eddington luminosity (L = 0.1LEdd). Using optical spectra from the Large Binocular Telescope, we estimate the bias of the interband continuum lags due to BLR emission observed in the filters. We find that the bias for filters with high levels of BLR contamination (∼20%) can be important for the shortest continuum lags, and likely has a significant impact on the u and U bands owing to Balmer continuum emission. ; The LBT is an international collaboration among institutions in the United States, Italy and Germany. LBT Corporation partners are: The Ohio State University, and The Research Corporation, on behalf of The University of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota and University of Virginia; The University of Arizona on behalf of the Arizona university system; Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Italy; LBT Beteiligungsgesellschaft, Germany, representing the Max-Planck Society, the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, and Heidelberg University. This paper used data obtained with the MODS spectrographs built with funding from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant AST-9987045 and the NSF Telescope System Instrumentation Program (TSIP), with additional funds from the Ohio Board of Regents and the Ohio State University Office of Research. This paper made use of the modsIDL spectral data reduction pipeline developed in part with funds provided by NSF Grant AST - 1108693. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the NSF, the University of California, the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation, and the TABASGO Foundation. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google. Support for HST program number GO-13330 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. M.M.F., G.D.R., B.M.P., C.J.G., and R.W.P. are grateful for the support of the NSF through grant AST- 1008882 to The Ohio State University. A.J.B. and L.P. have been supported by NSF grant AST-1412693. A.V.F. and W.- K.Z. are grateful for financial assistance from NSF grant AST- 1211916, the TABASGO Foundation, and the Christopher R. Redlich Fund. M.C. Bentz gratefully acknowledges support through NSF CAREER grant AST-1253702 to Georgia State University. M.C. Bottorff acknowledges HHMI for support through an undergraduate science education grant to Southwestern University. K.D.D. is supported by an NSF Fellowship awarded under grant AST-1302093. R.E. gratefully acknowledges support from NASA under awards NNX13AC26G, NNX13AC63G, and NNX13AE99G. J.M.G. gratefully acknowledges support from NASA under award NNH13CH61C. P.B.H. is supported by NSERC. M.I. acknowledges support from the Creative Initiative program, No. 2008-0060544, of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRFK) funded by the Korean government (MSIP). M.D.J. acknowledges NSF grant AST-0618209 used for obtaining the 0.91 m telescope at WMO. SRON is financially supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. B.C.K. is partially supported by the UC Center for Galaxy Evolution. C.S.K. acknowledges the support of NSF grant AST-1009756. D.C.L. acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-1009571 and AST-1210311, under which part of this research (photometric observations collected at MLO) was carried out. We thank Nhieu Duong, Harish Khandrika, Richard Mellinger, J. Chuck Horst, Steven Armen, and Eddie Garcia for assistance with the MLO observations. P.L. acknowledges support from Fondecyt grant #1120328. A.P. acknowledges support from a NSF graduate fellowship, a UCSB Dean’s Fellowship, and a NASA Einstein Fellowship. J.S.S. acknowledges CNPq, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Brazil) for partial support and The Ohio State University for warm hospitality. T.T. has been supported by NSF grant AST-1412315. T.T. and B.C.K. acknowledge support from the Packard Foundation in the form of a Packard Research Fellowship to T.T.; also, T.T. thanks the American Academy in Rome and the Observatory of Monteporzio Catone for kind hospitality. The Dark Cosmology Centre is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. M.V. gratefully acknowledges support from the Danish Council for Independent Research via grant no. DFF–4002-00275. J.-H.W. acknowledges support by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (No. 2010-0027910). E.D.B. is supported by Padua University through grants 60A02-5857/13, 60A02-5833/14, 60A02-4434/15, and CPDA133894. K.H. acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/M001296/1. S.A.K. thanks Dr. I. A. Rakhimov, the Director of Svetloe Observatory, for his support and hospitality. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. ; Peer-reviewed ; Post-print