English

Variability and the size-luminosity relation of the intermediate mass AGN in NGC 4395

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2020-04-08 v3

Abstract

We present the variability study of the lowest-luminosity Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 4395 based on the photometric monitoring campaigns in 2017 and 2018. Using 22 ground-based and space telescopes, we monitored NGC 4395 with a \sim5 minute cadence during a period of 10 days and obtained light curves in the UV, V, J, H, and K/Ks bands as well as the Hα\alpha narrow-band. The RMS variability is \sim0.13 mag on \emph{Swift}-UVM2 and V filter light curves, decreasing down to \sim0.01 mag on K filter. After correcting for continuum contribution to the Hα\alpha narrow-band, we measured the time lag of the Hα\alpha emission line with respect to the V-band continuum as 5531+27{55}^{+27}_{-31} to 12267+33{122}^{+33}_{-67} min. in 2017 and 4914+15{49}^{+15}_{-14} to 8314+13{83}^{+13}_{-14} min. in 2018, depending on the assumption on the continuum variability amplitude in the Hα\alpha narrow-band. We obtained no reliable measurements for the continuum-to-continuum lag between UV and V bands and among near-IR bands, due to the large flux uncertainty of UV observations and the limited time baseline. We determined the AGN monochromatic luminosity at 5100\AA\ λLλ=(5.75±0.40)×1039ergs1\lambda L_\lambda = \left(5.75\pm0.40\right)\times 10^{39}\,\mathrm{erg\,s^{-1}}, after subtracting the contribution of the nuclear star cluster. While the optical luminosity of NGC 4395 is two orders of magnitude lower than that of other reverberation-mapped AGNs, NGC 4395 follows the size-luminosity relation, albeit with an offset of 0.48 dex (\geq2.5σ\sigma) from the previous best-fit relation of Bentz et al. (2013).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.08028,
  title  = {Variability and the size-luminosity relation of the intermediate mass AGN in NGC 4395},
  author = {Hojin Cho and Jong-Hak Woo and Edmund Hodges-Kluck and Donghoon Son and Jaejin Shin and Elena Gallo and Hyun-Jin Bae and Thomas G. Brink and Wanjin Cho and Alexei V. Filippenko and John C. Horst and Dragana Ilić and Michael. D. Joner and Daeun Kang and Wonseok Kang and Shai Kaspi and Taewoo Kim and Andjelka B. Kovačević and Sahana Kumar and Huynh Anh N. Le and A. E. Nadzhip and Francisco Pozo Nuñez and V. G. Metlov and V. L. Oknyansky and Songyoun Park and Luka Č. Popović and Suvendu Rakshit and Malte Schramm and N. I. Shatsky and Michelle Spencer and Eon-Chang Sung and Hyun-il Sung and A. M. Tatarnikov and Oliver Vince},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.08028},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in ApJ (Feb. 23rd, 2020). 18 pages, 10 figures