Related papers: Diffuse emission in microlensed quasars and its im…
Quasar luminosity functions are a fundamental probe of the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes. Measuring the intrinsic luminosity function is difficult in practice, due to a multitude of observational and systematic effects.…
Lensing flux-ratio anomalies are most likely caused by gravitational lensing by small-scale dark matter structures. These anomalies offer the prospect of testing a fundamental prediction of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmological model: the…
With the advent of high-cadence and multi-band photometric monitoring facilities, continuum reverberation mapping is becoming of increasing importance to measure the physical size of quasar accretion disks. The method is based on the…
We study the variability of the thermal (accretion disc) and non-thermal (jet) emission of thirteen flat spectrum radio quasars in the optical and near infrared (OIR) regime using light curves spanning years with an average sampling of…
We reexamine the hypothesis that the optical/UV/soft X-ray continuum of Active Galactic Nuclei is thermal emission from an accretion disk. Previous studies have shown that fitting the spectra with the standard, optically thick and…
Polarized emission from a quasar is produced by wavelength-independent electron scattering surrounding its accretion disc, and thus avoid the contamination from its host galaxy and reveal the intrinsic emission spectrum of the accretion…
Single-frequency emission from an accretion disk around a black hole is broadened into a line profile due to gravitational redshift and the motion of the disk's particles relative to the observer. The ensemble of relativistically broadened…
Microlensing by stars within distant galaxies acting as strong gravitational lenses of multiply-imaged quasars, provides a unique and direct measurement of the internal structure of the lensed quasar on nano-arcsecond scales. The…
Although controversial, the scenario of microlensing as the dominant mechanism for the long-term optical variability of quasars does provide a natural explanation for both the statistical symmetry, achromaticity and lack of cosmological…
Because quasars are unresolved in optical imaging, their structures must presently be inferred. Gravitational microlensing offers the possibility to produce information about the luminous structure provided the Einstein ring diameter of the…
We analyze extensive spectroscopic and photometric data of the hypervariable quasar SDSS J131424+530527 (RMID 017) at z=0.456, an optical "changing look" quasar from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping project that increased…
We consider a class of models for the redshift evolution (between $0\lsim z \lsim 4$) of the observed optical and X-ray quasar luminosity functions (LFs), with the following assumptions: (i) the mass-function of dark matter halos follows…
To address the discrepancy where disk sizes exceed those predicted by standard models, we explore two extensions to disk size estimates within the UV/optical wavelength range: disk winds and color correction. We provide detailed,…
Radio emission is a good indicator of the jet power of radio-loud quasars, while the emission in broad-line can well represent the accretion disc radiation in quasars. We compile a sample of all sources of which the broad-line fluxes are…
Supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) undergo a wide range of accretion rates, which lead to diversity of appearance. We consider the effects of anisotropic radiation from accretion disks on the broad-line region (BLR),…
We present a technique for the successive restoration of the branches of the one-dimensional strip brightness distribution across a quasar's accretion disk via the analysis of observations of high magnification events in measured fluxes…
Roughly 10% of all quasars exhibit Broad Absorption Line (BAL) features which appear to arise in material outflowing at high velocity from the active galactic nucleus (AGN). The details of this outflow are, however, very poorly constrained…
The incidence of broad absorption lines (BALs) in quasar samples is often interpreted in the context of a geometric unification model consisting of an accretion disc and an associated outflow. We use the the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)…
Reverberation mapping estimates the size and kinematics of broad line regions (BLR) in Quasars and type I AGNs. It yields size-luminosity relation, to make QSOs standard cosmological candles, and mass-luminosity relation to study the…
Measuring the quasar distance through joint analysis of spectroastrometry (SA) and reverberation mapping (RM) observations is a new method for driving the development of cosmology. In this paper, we carry out detailed simulation and…