Revealing the Inner Workings of AGN with Survey-Based Reverberation Mapping


Wednesday, 13 September 2023 noon — 1 p.m. MST

AURA Lecture Hall

NOIRLab South Colloquia
Zachary Stone (Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Normally, the extragalactic distances involved in AGN dynamical analysis necessitates the correlation of time-series data between different bands, as the structures within AGN are too small to be resolved. This traditional “reverberation mapping” (RM) time-series analysis has been performed in both the near-UV/optical and the pure optical to obtain estimates of the average structure of certain parts of the AGN, as well as the supermassive black hole mass. Recently, high-quality and high-cadence observations of AGN have allowed for more finely detailed descriptions of geometry/kinematics of these different parts of a large sample of AGN, and may challenge our assumptions used in typical RM analysis. In this talk, I will present my recent work on accretion disk and traditional RM, as well as the potential for future highly resolved RM results.