Related papers: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping…
We modify the algorithm we proposed before in Aghamousa & Shafieloo (2015) on time delay estimation of the strong lens systems incorporating weighted cross-correlation and weighted summation of correlation coefficients. We show the high…
We present a study of variable faint optical sources discovered by comparing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) catalogs. We use SDSS measurements to photometrically recalibrate several…
Gravitationally lensed quasars offer a unique opportunity to study cosmological and extragalactic phenomena, using reliable light curves of the lensed images. This requires accurate deblending of the quasar images, which is not trivial due…
We present a catalog of 5039 broad absorption line (BAL) quasars (QSOs) in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5 (DR5) QSO catalog that have absorption troughs covering a continuous velocity range >= 2000 km/s. We have fit…
We expand our Bayesian Monte Carlo method for analyzing the light curves of gravitationally lensed quasars to simultaneously estimate time delays and quasar structure including their mutual uncertainties. We apply the method to HE1104-1805…
Strong gravitational lensing of time variable sources such as quasars and supernovae creates observable time delays between the multiple images. Time delays can provide a powerful cosmographic probe through the "time delay distance"…
Photometric reverberation mapping employs a wide bandpass to measure the AGN continuum variations and a suitable band, usually a narrow band (NB), to trace the echo of an emission line in the broad line region (BLR). The narrow band catches…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool to probe the inner structure of strongly lensed quasars and to constrain parameters of the stellar mass function of lens galaxies. This is done by analysing microlensing light curves between the…
We present results from the largest systematic investigation of broad absorption line (BAL) acceleration to date. We use spectra of 140 quasars from three Sloan Digital Sky Survey programs to search for global velocity offsets in BALs over…
Temporal analysis of radiation from Astrophysical sources like Active Galactic Nuclei, X-ray Binaries and Gamma-ray bursts provide information on the geometry and sizes of the emitting regions. Establishing that two light-curves in…
The nearby dwarf spiral galaxy NGC 4395 contains a broad-lined active galactic nucleus (AGN) of exceptionally low luminosity powered by accretion onto a central black hole of very low mass ($\sim10^4-10^5$ M$_\odot$). In order to constrain…
In this third paper of a series on radio weak lensing for cosmology with the Square Kilometre Array, we scrutinise synergies between cosmic shear measurements in the radio and optical/near-IR bands for mitigating systematic effects. We…
Spectral lags are deduced for 1437 long GRBs with peak fluxes extending to near the BATSE trigger threshold. The lags are modeled to approximate the observed distribution in the peak flux-lag plane, realizing a noise-free representation.…
The study of quasar variability has long been seen as a way to understanding the structure of the central engine of active galactic nuclei, and as a means of verifying the morphology of the standard model. Much work has already been done on…
The broad Mg II line in quasars has distinct variability properties compared with broad Balmer lines: it is less variable, and usually does not display a "breathing" mode, the increase in the average cloud distance when luminosity…
Quasars, as the most luminous persistent sources in the Universe, have broad applications for cosmological studies. In particular, they can be employed to directly measure the expansion history of the Universe, similarly to SNe Ia. The…
Recently, Shen et al. (2005) studied the contributions of curvature effect of fireballs to the spectral lag and showed that the observed lags could be accounted for by the effect. Here we check their results by performing a more precise…
We use multi-epoch quasar spectroscopy to determine how accurately single-epoch spectroscopy can locate quasars in emission-line parameter space in order to inform investigations where time-resolved spectroscopy is not available. We explore…
We present the second report of our systematic search for strongly lensed quasars from the data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). From extensive follow-up observations of 136 candidate objects, we find 36 lenses in the full sample of…
We examine the nature of brightness fluctuations in the UV-Optical spectral region of an ordinary quasar with 881 optical brightness measurements made during the epoch 1993 - 1999. We find evidence for systematic trends having the character…