Reverberation Mapping the Inner Environments of Supermassive Black Holes
Author | : Yasaman Homayouni |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2021 |
ISBN-10 | : OCLC:1336502915 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 (15 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: Supermassive black holes are among the most exciting and unusual objects in our Universe, as literal rips in space and time. Reliable measurements of the mass, the structure, and geometry of infalling material to supermassive black holes are critical to understanding the growth history of black holes and galaxy formation and evolution over cosmic time. Beyond the local Universe, the gold standard for black hole mass and accretion-disk structure measurements is reverberation mapping. I will present a new generation of industrial-scale study of the structure and geometry of infalling material and black hole mass studies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project and Ultraviolet-monitoring using the Hubble Space Telescope. These new measurements have transformed our understanding of supermassive black holes by dramatically expanding the number of quasars with reliable mass and accretion structure in distant Universe. These measurements have also revealed a surprisingly large diversity in accretion structure and the broad-line region size of quasars at the peak of supermassive black hole assembly. My work lays the foundation for future work by developing the framework to reliably measure mass and the structure of accretion using direct disk size measurements from future massive time-domain photometric monitoring studies from SDSS-V and Rubin/LSST.