Related papers: Cold Accretion Disks and Lineless Quasars
In many black hole systems, the accretion disk is expected to be misaligned with respect to the black hole spin axis. If the scale height of the disk is much smaller than the misalignment angle, the spin of the black hole can tear the disk…
The UV-X continuum, the X-ray spectral features, and the variability in these bands provide powerful tools for studying the innermost regions of AGNs from which we gain an insight into the accretion process. In this chapter the discussion…
X-ray emission from AGN is believed to be produced via Comptonization of optical/UV seed photons emitted by the accretion disk, up-scattered by hot electrons in a corona surrounding the black hole. A critical compactness vs. temperature…
We calculate the atmospheric structure of an accretion disk around a Kerr black hole and obtain its X-ray spectrum, which exhibits prominent atomic transitions under certain circumstances. The gravitational and Doppler (red)shifts of the C…
We present Fe Kalpha line profiles from and images of relativistic discs with finite thickness around a rotating black hole using a novel code. The line is thought to be produced by iron fluorescence of a relatively cold X-ray illuminated…
Microlensing observations indicate that quasar accretion discs have half-light radii larger than expected from standard theoretical predictions based on quasar fluxes or black hole masses. Blackburne and colleagues have also found a very…
We review past work using broad emission lines as virial estimators of black hole masses in quasars. Basically one requires estimates of the emitting region radius and virial velocity dispersion to obtain black hole masses. The three major…
Using the public data from the Herschel wide field surveys, we study the far-infrared properties of optical-selected quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Within the common area of $\sim 172~deg^2$, we have identified the far-infrared…
Flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) constitute a class of jetted active galaxies characterized by a very luminous accretion disk, prominent and rapidly moving line-emitting cloud structures (Broad Line Region, BLR), and a surrounding dense…
We present an XMM-Newton observation of the radio-quiet quasar Q0056-363 (z=0.162). This is the first time that this quasar is observed in the hard X-ray range (above 2 keV). We find that Q0056-363 is a powerful X-ray quasar, with a 0.3-12…
Tidal disruption of main sequence stars by black holes has generally been thought to lead to a signal dominated by UV emission. If, however, the black hole spins rapidly and the poloidal magnetic field intensity on the black hole horizon is…
A landmark of accretion processes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) is the continuum originating from a complex structure, i.e., an accretion disk and a corona around a supermassive black hole. Modelling the broad-band spectral energy…
We present evidence that the high-velocity CIV lambda 1549 emission line gas of radio-loud quasars may originate in a disk-like configuration, in close proximity to the accretion disk often assumed to emit the low-ionization lines. For a…
We analyzed a large sample of radio-loud and radio-quiet quasar spectra at redshift 1.0 < z < 1.2 to compare the inferred underlying quasar continuum slopes (after removal of the host galaxy contribution) with accretion disk models. The…
Over the past 15 years, examples of exotic radio-quiet quasars with intrinsically weak or absent broad emission line regions (BELRs) have emerged from large-scale spectroscopic sky surveys. Here, we present spectroscopy of seven such weak…
The physical mechanisms of the quasar ultraviolet (UV)-optical variability are not well understood despite the long history of observations. Recently, Dexter & Agol presented a model of quasar UV-optical variability, which assumes large…
Weak-line quasars (WLQs) are a subset of type 1 quasars with remarkably weak high-ionization broad emission lines but normal optical/UV continua. Using 371,091 quasars from SDSS DR16, we define WLQs by analyzing outliers in three relations:…
Infrared spectroscopy of the H-alpha emission lines of a sub-sample of 19 high-redshift (0.8 < z < 2.3) Molonglo quasars, selected at 408 MHz, is presented. These emission lines are fitted with composite models of broad and narrow emission,…
This work studies the relationship between accretion-disk size and quasar properties, using a sample of 95 quasars from the SDSS-RM project with measured lags between the $g$ and $i$ photometric bands. Our sample includes disk lags that are…
It is believed that the gas accretion onto the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is the main process of powering its luminous emission, which occurs in optical, UV and X-ray regimes and less frequently in radio waves. The observational fact…