The Seoul National University AGN Monitoring Project III: H$β$ lag measurements of 32 luminous AGNs and the high-luminosity end of the size--luminosity relation
astro-ph.GA
/ Authors
Jong-Hak Woo, Shu Wang, Suvendu Rakshit, Hojin Cho, Donghoon Son, Vardha N. Bennert, Elena Gallo, Edmund Hodges-Kluck, Tommaso Treu, Aaron J. Barth
and 21 more authors
Wanjin Cho, Adi Foord, Jaehyuk Geum, Hengxiao Guo, Yashashree Jadhav, Yiseul Jeon, Kyle M. Kabasares, Won-Suk Kang, Changseok Kim, Minjin Kim, Tae-Woo Kim, Huynh Anh N. Le, Matthew A. Malkan, Amit Kumar Mandal, Daeseong Park, Chance Spencer, Jaejin Shin, Hyun-il Sung, Vivian U, Peter R. Williams, Nick Yee
/ Abstract
We present the main results from a long-term reverberation mapping campaign carried out for the Seoul National University Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) Monitoring Project. High-quality data were obtained during 2015-2021 for 32 luminous AGNs (i.e., continuum luminosity in the range of $10^{44-46}$ erg s$^{-1}$) at a regular cadence, of 20-30 days for spectroscopy and 3-5 days for photometry. We obtain time lag measurements between the variability in the H$β$ emission and the continuum for 32 AGNs; twenty-five of those have the best lag measurements based on our quality assessment, examining correlation strength, and the posterior lag distribution. Our study significantly increases the current sample of reverberation-mapped AGNs, particularly at the moderate to high luminosity end. Combining our results with literature measurements, we derive a H$β$ broad line region size--luminosity relation with a shallower slope than reported in the literature. For a given luminosity, most of our measured lags are shorter than the expectation, implying that single-epoch black hole mass estimators based on previous calibrations could suffer large systematic uncertainties.