Related papers: Accretion disc reverberation mapping in a high-red…
Quasars are thought to be powered by supermassive black holes accreting surrounding gas. Central to this picture is a putative accretion disk which is believed to be the source of the majority of the radiative output. It is well known,…
Naturally occurring water vapor maser emission at 1.35 cm wavelength provides an accurate probe for the study of accretion disks around highly compact objects, thought to be black holes, in the centers of active galaxies. Because of the…
We investigate the properties of the most distant quasars ULASJ134208.10+092838.61 ($z = 7.54$), ULASJ112001.48+064124.3 ($z = 7.08$) and DELSJ003836.10-152723.6 ($z = 7.02$) studying their Optical-UV emission that shows clear evidence of…
We develop an accretion disc (AD) fitting method, utilising thin and slim disc models and Bayesian inference with the Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo approach, testing it on the most luminous known quasar, SMSS J215728.21-360215.1, at redshift…
If supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are the energy sources that power quasars and active galactic nuclei, then QSO SDSS 1148+5251, the quasar with the highest redshift (z_QSO=6.43), hosts a supermassive black hole formed within 0.9 Gyr…
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.…
The innermost regions of quasars can be resolved by a gravitational-lens {\lq}telescope{\rq} on scales down to a few AU. For the purpose, X-ray observations are most preferable, because X-rays originating from the innermost regions, can be…
Proximity zones of high-redshift quasars are unique probes of their central supermassive black holes as well as the intergalactic medium in the last stages of reionization. We present 22 new measurements of proximity zones of quasars with…
The accretion-ejection activities of black holes play a vital role in shaping the Universe. Bright and recurrent black hole X-ray binaries are ideal objects for studying accretion physics across a wide range of accretion rates, providing…
The existence of billion-solar-mass black holes hosted in luminous quasars within the first gigayear of cosmic history poses a challenge to our understanding of supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth. The problem is further exacerbated by…
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…
We analyzed the microlensing of the X-ray and optical emission of the lensed quasar PG 1115+080. We find that the effective radius of the X-ray emission is 1.3(+1.1 -0.5) dex smaller than that of the optical emission. Viewed as a thin disk…
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…
The optical/ultraviolet (UV) variability of quasars has been discovered to be correlated with other quasar properties, such as luminosity, black hole mass and rest-frame wavelength. However,the origin of variability has been a puzzle so…
A new theory of quasars is presented in which the matter of thin accretion disks around black holes is supplied by stars that plunge through the disk. Stars in the central part of the host galaxy are randomly perturbed to highly radial…
We develop a general method for analyzing the light curves of microlensed quasars and apply it to the OGLE light curves of the four-image lens Q2237+0305. We simultaneously estimate the effective source velocity, the average stellar mass,…
In a multi-wavelength survey of $13$ quasars at $5.8\lesssim z\lesssim6.5$, that were pre-selected to be potentially young, we find five objects with extremely small proximity zone sizes that may imply UV-luminous quasar lifetimes of…
We use the integrated spectrum of the X-ray background and quasars Spectral Energy Distribution to derive the contribution of quasars to the energy output of the Universe. We find a lower limit for the energy from accretion onto black holes…
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,…
We develop a broadband spectral model, agnsli}, to describe super-Eddington black hole accretion disc spectra. This is based on the slim disc emissivity, where radial advection keeps the surface luminosity at the local Eddington limit,…