Related papers: Modeling the UV/optical continuum time-lags in AGN
We performed an intensive accretion disk reverberation mapping campaign on the high accretion rate active galactic nucleus Mrk 142 in early 2019. Mrk 142 was monitored with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory for 4 months in X-rays and 6…
We study multi-wavelength variability of a bare Seyfert 1 galaxy Fairall~9 using \swift{} monitoring observations consisting of $165$ usable pointings spanning nearly two years and covering six UV/optical bands and X-rays. Fairall~9 is…
Recent intense X-ray and UV monitoring campaigns with Swift have detected clear UV lags behind X-ray in several local active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The UV to X-ray lags are often larger (by a factor up to ~ 20) than expected if the UV…
Observations suggest that accretion discs in many X-ray binaries are likely flared. An outer edge of the disc intercepts radiation from the central X-ray source. Part of that radiation is absorbed and reemitted in the optical/UV spectral…
The relativistically broad X-ray iron line seen in many AGN spectra is thought to originate from the central regions of the putative black hole accretion disk. Both the line profile and strength will vary in response to rapid variability of…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) vary in their brightness across all wavelengths. Moreover, longer wavelength ultraviolet - optical continuum light curves appear to be delayed with respect to shorter wavelength light curves. A simple way to…
Correlated variability between coronal X-rays and disc optical/UV photons provides a very useful diagnostic of the interplay between the different regions around an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and how they interact. AGN that reveal strong…
Accreting black holes and neutron stars in their hard (low) state show not only very similar X/gamma-ray spectra but also that the behaviour of their light curves is quite similar which can be quantified as having similar power-density…
Variable continuum emission from AGN can be used to probe the structure of their accretion disks via reverberation mapping. Assuming a variable, hot inner light source irradiates the surrounding accretion disk, time delays between different…
Reverberation mapping is one of the main techniques used to study active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disks. Traditional continuum reverberation mapping uses short lags between variability in different wavelength AGN light curves on the…
The physical origin of the recently identified slow-moving temperature fluctuations in accretion disks around super-massive black holes (SMBHs) cannot be accounted for by reverberation models. In this work, we propose that large-scale…
UV and optical continuum reverberation mapping is powerful for probing the accretion disk and inner broad-line region. However, recent reverberation mapping campaigns in the X-ray, UV, and optical have found lags consistently longer than…
In the past decade, Swift has performed several AGN high-cadence reverberation mapping campaigns, and generally found that the UV/optical interband lags are $\sim$3 times longer than predicted for a standard thin disk, thus coined "the…
Warped accretion discs in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) exert a torque on the black hole that tends to align the rotation axis with the angular momentum of the outer disc. We compute the magnitude of this torque by solving numerically for…
The illumination pattern (or emissivity profile) of the accretion disc due to the reflection of X-rays in AGN can be understood in terms of relativistic effects on the rays propagating from a source in a corona surrounding the central black…
Continuum reverberation mapping (RM) is a powerful technique for constraining the accretion disk structure in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). In typical cases, the shorter-wavelength emission is used as the reference, and a positive time lag…
I summarise and analyse key problems with observations of the UV bump in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), and especially the accretion disc interpretation - the temperature problem, the ionisation problem, the timescale problem, and the…
The recent detection of X-ray reverberation lags, especially in the Fe K\alpha\ line region, around Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) has opened up the possibility of studying the time-resolved response (reflection) of hard X-rays from the…
Recent multi-band variability studies have revealed that active galactic nucleus (AGN) accretion disc sizes are generally larger than the predictions of the classical thin disc by a factor of $2\sim 3$. This hints at some missing key…
X-ray reverberation in AGN, believed to be the result of the reprocessing of corona photons by the underlying accretion disk, has allowed us to probe the properties of the inner-most regions of the accretion flow and the central black hole.…