Related papers: Diffuse emission in microlensed quasars and its im…
Determining the nature of emission processes at the heart of quasars is critical for understanding environments of supermassive black holes. One of the key open questions is the origin of long-wavelength emission from radio-quiet quasars.…
A method is proposed for measuring the size of the broad emission line region (BLR) in quasars using broadband photometric data. A feasibility study, based on numerical simulations, points to the advantages and pitfalls associated with this…
Microlensing of gravitationally lensed quasars by the stars in the foreground lens galaxy can be used to probe the nature of dark matter, to determine the mean stellar mass in the lens galaxy, and to measure the internal structure of quasar…
Microlensing not only brings extra magnification lightcurves on top of the intrinsic ones but also shifts them in time domain, making the actual time-delays between images of strongly lensed active galactic nucleus change on the $\sim$…
Recent models for the emission clouds within the Broad Line Region of quasars suggest that they are due to transient overdensities within an overall turbulent medium. If this were the case, the broad line emission would spatially appear…
We present eight monitoring seasons of the four brightest images of the gravitational lens SDSS J1004+4112 observed between December 2003 and October 2010. Using measured time delays for the images A, B and C and the model predicted time…
We measure the differential microlensing of the UV Fe II and Fe III emission line blends between 14 quasar image pairs in 13 gravitational lenses. We find that the UV iron emission is strongly microlensed in 4 cases with amplitudes…
It has been found that some quasars are undergoing quasi-periodic variations (most of them with damped amplitudes) in optical bands from long-term monitoring campaigns, but how to explain the origin of such light curve variations still…
We analyze the broadband photometric light curves of Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Sergeev et al. (2005) sample and find that a) perturbations propagating across the continuum emitting region are a general phenomenon securely detected in most…
We use published mid-IR and V-band flux ratios for images A and B of Q2237+0305 to demonstrate that the size of the mid-IR emission region has a scale comparable to or larger than the microlens Einstein Radius (ER, ~10^17 cm for solar mass…
In the upcoming synoptic all--sky survey era of astronomy, thousands of new multiply imaged quasars are expected to be discovered and monitored regularly. Light curves from the images of gravitationally lensed quasars are further affected…
Given the anisotropic emission from quasar accretion discs, their viewing angle affects estimates of the quasar luminosity, black-hole mass and Eddington ratio. Discs appear overluminous when viewed pole-on and underluminous when viewed at…
The first investigations of the response of the microlensing magnification pattern (at an optical depth of order unity) to the mass function of the microlenses found that the resulting statistics depend only on the mean microlens mass <m>.…
In a recent paper, McLure & Jarvis (2002, astro-ph/0204473, v.1) reanalyze AGN broad-line reverberation measurements presented in Kaspi et al. (2000). They find the broad-line region size and the AGN luminosity at 5100 Ang can be related by…
We calculate the observable signature of a black hole accretion disk with a gap or hole created by a secondary black hole embedded in the disk. We find that for an interesting range of parameters of black hole masses (~10^6 to 10^9 solar…
Context. An optically thick, geometrically thin accretion disk (AD) around a supermassive black hole might contribute to broad-line emission in type-1 active galactic nuclei (AGN). However, emission line profiles are most often not…
We present bolometric corrections, as a function of wavelength, for powerful radio-loud quasars from the Revised Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Galaxies (3CRR) at 1 < z < 2. The bolometric luminosities are derived by integrating the…
We explore the mid-infrared (mid-IR) through ultraviolet (UV) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 119,652 luminous broad-lined quasars with 0.064<z<5.46 using mid-IR data from Spitzer and WISE, near-infrared data from Two Micron All Sky…
We calculated the expected microlens light curves for several accretion-flow models and compared the results to find what aspects of distinct flow structures can be extracted from the microlens light curves. As for the flow models, we…
The detailed workings of the central engines of powerful quasars remain a mystery. This is primarily due to the fact that, at their cosmological distances, the inner regions of these quasars are spatially unresolvable. Reverberation mapping…