English

Investigating the Variable Continuum Lags in PG 2130+099

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-04-03 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Broadband photometric reverberation mapping (RM) provides a measure of the size of the continuum-emitting region in active galactic nuclei (AGN). Previous monitoring campaigns of PG 2130+099 disagree as to whether the continuum emitting region size is consistent with that predicted for a standard optically thick geometrically thin accretion disk. We present \sim6 months of observations from several robotic telescopes, providing the highest cadence and widest wavelength coverage photometric RM study of PG 2130+099 to date. Our results indicate that inferred size of the continuum-emitting region in PG 2130+099, like many recently observed AGN, is larger than the simplest predictions for an irradiated geometrically thin, optically thick accretion disk. We also perform a flux-flux analysis, finding a variable spectrum broadly consistent with a disk, and a constant component with enhanced i\textit{i}-band emission, potentially due to Hα\alpha. We find some evidence of increasing lag with luminosity, but previous lag measurements are too uncertain to be definitive.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.01858,
  title  = {Investigating the Variable Continuum Lags in PG 2130+099},
  author = {Jake A. Miller and Edward M. Cackett and Mike Goad and Kirk T. Korista},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.01858},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

16 Pages (14 Main + 2 Appendix), 8 Figures, 4 Tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:44:06.529Z