Hα Time Delays of Active Galactic Nuclei from the Zwicky Transient Facility Broadband Photometry

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal Vol. 966; no. 1; pp. 5 - 27
• Main Authors: Ma, Qinchun, Wen, Yuhan, Wu, Xue-Bing, Gu, Huapeng, Fu, Yuming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia The American Astronomical Society 01.05.2024; IOP Publishing
• Subjects: Active galactic nuclei; Black holes; Broadband; Chi-square test; Continuum radiation; Correlation; Correlation analysis; Criteria; Cross correlation; Emission lines; Emissions; H alpha line; Light curve; Mapping; Nucleus; Photometry; Polls & surveys; Reverberation; Reverberation mapping; Sky surveys (astronomy); Supermassive black holes; Transients (astronomy)
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad34d6

Abstract In our previous work on broadband photometric reverberation mapping (PRM), we proposed the interpolated cross-correlation function (ICCF)-Cut process to obtain the time lags of the H α emission line from two broadband lightcurves via subtracting the continuum emission from the line band. Extending the work, we enlarge our sample to the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) database. We adopt two criteria to select 123 type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with sufficient variability and smooth light curves from 3537 AGNs at z < 0.09 with more than 100 epoch observations in the g and r bands from the ZTF database. We calculate the H α time lags for 23 of them that have previous spectroscopic reverberation mapping (SRM) results using the ICCF-Cut, Just Another Vehicle for Estimating Lags In Nuclei (JAVELIN), and χ 2 methods. Our obtained H α time lags are slightly larger than the H β time lags, which is consistent with the previous SRM results and the theoretical model of the AGN broad-line region. The comparisons between the SRM and PRM lag distributions and between the subtracted emission line light curves indicate that after selecting AGNs with the two criteria, combining the ICCF-Cut, JAVELIN, and χ 2 methods provides an efficient way to get the reliable H α lags from the broadband PRM. Such techniques can be used to estimate the black hole masses of a large sample of AGNs in large multiepoch photometric sky surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the survey from the Wide Field Survey Telescope in the near future.