Active Galactic Nuclei with Ultrafast Outflows Monitoring Project: The Broad-line Region of Mrk 79 as a Disk Wind

Abstract

We developed a spectroscopic monitoring project to investigate the kinematics of the broad-line region (BLR) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) with ultra-fast outflows (UFOs). Mrk 79 is a radio-quiet AGN with UFOs and warm absorbers, had been monitored by three reverberation mapping (RM) campaigns, but its BLR kinematics is not understood yet. In this paper, we report the results from a new RM-campaign of Mrk 79, which was undertaken by Lijiang 2.4-m telescope. Mrk 79 is seeming to come out the faint state, the mean flux approximates a magnitude fainter than historical record. We successfully measured the lags of the broad emission lines including Hβ λ4861, Hγ λ4340, He II λ4686 and He I λ5876 with respect to the varying AGN continuum. Based on the broad Hβ λ4861 line, we measured black hole (BH) mass of M • = 5.13 +1.57 −1.55 ×10 7 M ⊙ , estimated accretion rates ofṀ • = (0.05 ± 0.02) L Edd c −2 , indicating that Mrk 79 is a sub-Eddington accretor. We found that Mrk 79 deviates from the canonical Radius−Luminosity relationship. The marginal blueshift of the broad He II λ4686 line detected from rms spectrum indicates outflow of high-ionization gas. The velocity-resolved lag profiles of the broad Hγ λ4340, Hβ λ4861, and He I λ5876 lines show similar signatures that the largest lag occurs in the red wing of the lines then the lag decreases to both sides. These signatures should suggest that the BLR of Keplerian motion probably exists the outflow gas motion. All findings including UFOs, warm absorbers, and the kinematics of high-and low-ionization BLR, may provide an indirect evidence that the BLR of Mrk 79 probably originates from disk wind.

Reverberation Mapping Measurements of Black Hole Masses and Broad-Line Region Kinematics in Mrk 817 and NGC 7469

“…In some degree, this is consistent with the previous finding from NGC 5548 that the BLR size follows the varying optical luminosity at 5100 Å (Lu et al 2016), but Lu et al (2016) extra found that the variations of the BLR size lag behind the varying optical luminosity. Lu et al (2019a) also found that the BLR size of Mrk 79 is significantly smaller in the low-luminosity state than normal-luminosity state. Like NGC 5548, developing long-term RM campaign for more famous AGNs would help us to understand the variations of BLR with the varying ionizing radiation.…”

“…During the long slit spectroscopy, we oriented long slit to take the spectra of AGN and a nearby non-varying comparison star simultaneously, this observation method was described in detail by Maoz et al (1990) and Kaspi et al (2000). The comparison star as a reference standard can provide a high-precision flux calibration (Lu et al 2016(Lu et al , 2019a. In addition, the spectra of comparison star can be used to correct the telluric absorption lines of the target spectrum (Lu et al 2021).…”

“…INTRODUCTION Reverberation mapping (RM; Blandford & McKee 1982;Peterson 1993) has been extensively used to measure the mass of accreting supermassive black hole (SMBH) and investigate the kinematics of the broad-line region (BLR) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) through intensively spectroscopic monitoring. Up to now, researchers had obtained RM measurements for more than 100 AGNs based on the different RM campaigns (e.g., Peterson et al 1998;Kaspi et al 2000;Denney et al 2010;Bentz et al 2009;Barth et al 2011;Du et al 2014;Lu et al 2019a;Grier et al 2017;Fausnaugh et al 2017;Huang et al 2019;Brotherton et al 2020;Feng et al 2021;Hu et al 2021, etc.). The canonical Radius−Luminosity relationship was constructed from several RM campaigns before 2012 (Wandel et al 1999;Kaspi et al 2000;Bentz et al 2013), and discussed in a series of works (e.g., Czerny et al 2019;Yu et al 2020), which provides an indirect way to estimate SMBH mass from single spectrum across cosmic time.…”

“…We use a cosmology with H 0 = 67.8 km s −1 Mpc −1 , Ω Λ = 0.692, and Ω M = 0.308 (Planck Collaboration et al 2016), 2. OBSERVATION AND DATA REDUCTION Long slit spectroscopy and data analysis employed in this work follow closely the previous processes laid out by Lu et al (2019a) for the results from the reverberation campaign on Mrk 79. The reader is also referred to previous works, such as Du et al (2014) and Lu et al (2016), for more details and discussions on these experiments.…”

Radiation Hydrodynamics Models of Active Galactic Nuclei: Beyond the Central Parsec

“…Here, the AGN is a structure mostly illuminated by a bright accretion disk around a supermassive black hole (SMBH). Additional contributions to luminosity and extinction can come from other components, such as a disk wind (Konigl & Kartje 1994;Murray et al 1995;Elvis 2000;Proga et al 2000;Long & Knigge 2002;Proga & Kallman 2004;Kollatschny & Zetzl 2013;Higginbottom et al 2013;Galianni & Horne 2013;Laor & Davis 2014;Higginbottom et al 2014;Matthews et al 2015Matthews et al , 2017Mangham et al 2017;Nomura & Ohsuga 2017;Lu et al 2019;Mizumoto et al 2019) or a warped disk (Petterson 1977;Papaloizou & Lin 1995;Pringle 1997;Nayakshin 2005;Ulubay-Siddiki et al 2009;Wu et al 2010;King et al 2013;Matthews et al 2020). The luminous central engine is then obscured by an axisymmetric dusty molecular 'torus', classically a static structure whose thickness is supported by infrared radiation pressure (Pier & Krolik 1992;Granato & Danese 1994;Krolik 2007;Shi & Krolik 2008).…”