Related papers: Corona-Heated Accretion-disk Reprocessing (CHAR): …
The characteristic timescale at which the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) turns from red noise to white noise can probe the accretion physics around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). A number of works have studied the…
In the innermost regions of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), matter is understood to be flowing onto the Supermassive black hole (SMBH), which forms an accretion disk. This disk is responsible for the optical/UV continuum emission observed in…
Continuum reverberation mapping with high-cadence, long-term UV/optical monitoring of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) enables us to resolve the AGN central engine sizes on different timescales. The frequency-resolved time lags of NGC 5548…
Radiation emitted from an accretion disk around a massive black hole is a widely discussed model for the UV/soft X-ray excess emission observed in the spectra of many AGN. A self-consistent calculation of the structure and the emerging…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are complex phenomena. At the heart of an AGN is a relativistic accretion disk around a spinning supermassive black hole (SMBH) with an X-ray emitting corona and, sometimes, a relativistic jet. On larger scales,…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are believed to be powered by accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole. A fundamental ingredient in shaping our understanding of AGN is their variability across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.…
Thermal reverberation in accretion discs of active galactic nuclei is thought to be the reason of the continuum UV/optical time lags seen in these sources. Recently, we studied thermal reverberation of a standard Novikov-Thorne accretion…
The characteristic timescale ($\tau$) of continuum variability of the accretion disk in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is known to be related to the thermal timescale, which is predicted to scale with AGN luminosity ($L$) and restframe…
The UV/optical light curves of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are commonly described by the Damped Random Walk (DRW) model. However, the physical interpretation of the damping timescale, a key parameter in the DRW model, remains unclear.…
Disk continuum reverberation mapping is one of the primary ways we learn about active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disks. Reverberation mapping assumes that time-varying X-rays incident on the accretion disk drive variability in…
Context: Variations in the mass accretion rate appear to be responsible for the rapid transitions in spectral type that are observed in increasingly more active galactic nuclei (AGNs). These objects are now labeled "changing-look" AGNs and…
Over the past decade, a significant amount of effort has been put into investigating the ultraviolet (UV) and optical variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Comprehensive studies of intensive multi-wavelength monitoring and surveys…
We study the structure of accretion disks around supermassive black holes in the radial range $30\sim 100$ gravitational radii, using a three dimensional radiation magneto-hydrodynamic simulation. For typical conditions in this region of…
Accretion flows toward black holes can be of a quite different nature, described as an optically thick cool gas flow in a disk for high accretion rates or as a hot coronal optically thin gas flow for low accretion rates, possibly affected…
We show how wavelength-dependent time delays between continuum flux variations of AGN can be used to test the standard black hole-accretion disc paradigm, by measuring the temperature structure $T(R)$ of the gaseous material surrounding the…
In this paper, standard accretion disk models of AGNs are tested using light curves of 26 objects well observed for reverberation mapping. Time scales of variations are estimated by the most common definition of the variability time scale…
On the basis of data from an energy-conserving 3D general relativistic MHD simulation, we predict the statistical character of variability in the coronal luminosity from accreting black holes. When the inner boundary of the corona is…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) have been observed to vary stochastically with 10-20 rms amplitudes over a range of optical wavelengths where the emission arises in an accretion disk. Since the accretion disk is unlikely to vary coherently,…
The UV/optical variability of AGN has long been thought to be driven by the X-ray illumination of the accretion disk. However, recent multi-wavelength campaigns of nearby Seyfert galaxies seem to challenge this paradigm, with an apparent…
We report that moderately eccentric flows around supermassive black holes (SMBHs), formed via either circumnuclear gas accretion or tidal disruption events, generate eccentricity cascades (from >0.8 to 0.2 outward), explaining…