English

OzDES Reverberation Mapping of Active Galactic Nuclei: Final Data Release, Black-Hole Mass Results, & Scaling Relations

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-05-12 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

Over the last decade, the Australian Dark Energy (OzDES) collaboration has used Reverberation Mapping to measure the masses of high redshift supermassive black holes. Here we present the final review and analysis of this OzDES reverberation mapping campaign. These observations use 6-7 years of photometric and spectroscopic observations of 735 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the redshift range 0.13-3.85 and bolometric luminosity range 44.3 - 47.5 erg/s. Both photometry and spectra are observed in visible wavelengths, allowing for the physical scale of the AGN broad line region to be estimated from reverberations of the H\b{eta}, MgII and CIV emission lines. We successfully use reverberation mapping to constrain the masses of 62 super-massive black holes, and combine with existing data to fit a power law to the lag-luminosity relation for the H\b{eta} and MgII lines with a scatter of ~0.25 dex, the tightest yet identified, fit specifically for consistency with high redshift AGN. We fit a similarly constrained relation for CIV, resolving a tension with the low luminosity literature AGN by accounting for selection effects arising from finite survey length. We also examine the impact of emission line width and luminosity (related to accretion rate) in reducing the scatter of these scaling relationships and find no significant improvement over the lag-only approach for any of the three lines. Using these relations, we further estimate the masses and accretion rates of 246 AGN with single epoch methods. We also use these relations to estimate the relative sizes of the H\b{eta}, MgII and CIV emitting regions. In short, we provide a comprehensive benchmark of high redshift AGN reverberation mapping at the close of this most recent generation of surveys, including light curves, time-delays, and a set of significantly improved radius-luminosity relations for use with high-redshift populations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.01261,
  title  = {OzDES Reverberation Mapping of Active Galactic Nuclei: Final Data Release, Black-Hole Mass Results, & Scaling Relations},
  author = {H. McDougall and T. M. Davis and Z. Yu and P. Martini and C. Lidman and U. Malik and A. Penton and G. F. Lewis and B. E. Tucker and B. J. S. Pope and S. Allam and F. Andrade-Oliveira and J. Asorey and D. Bacon and S. Bocquet and D. Brooks and A. Carnero Rosell and D. Carollo and A. Carr and J. Carretero and T. Y. Cheng and L. N. da Costa and M. E. da Silva Pereira and J. De Vicente and H. T. Diehl and P. Doel and S. Everett and J. García-Bellido and K. Glazebrook and D. Gruen and G. Gutierrez and K. Herner and S. R. Hinton and D. L. Hollowood and D. J. James and A. G. Kim and K. Kuehn and S. Lee and M. March and J. L. Marshall and J. Mena-Fernández and F. Menanteau and R. Miquel and J. Myles and R. L. C. Ogando and A. Porredon and E. Sanchez and D. Sanchez Cid and R. Sharp and M. Smith and E. Suchyta and M. E. C. Swanson and C. To and D. L. Tucker and A. R. Walker and N. Weaverdyck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01261},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

36 Pages, 15 Figures; see also companion paper Penton et. al. 2025