Microlensing and Intrinsic Variability of the Broad Emission Lines of Lensed Quasars

Abstract

We study the BELs in a sample of 11 gravitationally lensed quasars with at least two epochs of observation to identify intrinsic variability and to disentangle it from microlensing. To improve our statistical significance we also include 15 systems with single-epoch spectra. MgII and CIII] emission lines are only weakly affected by microlensing, but CIV shows strong microlensing in some cases, even for regions of the line core, associated with small projected velocities. However, excluding the strongly microlensed cases, there is a strikingly good match between the red wings of the CIV and CIII] profiles. Analysis of these results supports the existence of two regions in the BLR, one that is insensitive to microlensing (of size $\gtrsim$ 50 light-days and kinematics not confined to a plane) and another that shows up only when it is magnified by microlensing (of size of a few light-days, comparable to the accretion disk). Both regions can contribute in different proportions to the emission lines of different species and, within each line profile, to different velocity bins, all of which complicates detailed studies of the BLR based on microlensing size estimates. The strength of the microlensing indicates that some spectral features that make up the pseudo-continuum, such as the shelf-like feature at λ1610 or several FeIII blends, may in part arise from an inner region of the accretion disk. In the case of FeII, microlensing is strong in some blends but not in others. This opens up interesting possibilities to study quasar accretion disk kinematics.

References in corpus (36)

• Composite Quasar Spectra From the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Low-Luminosity End of the Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei
• The Radius-Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei: The Effect of Host-Galaxy Starlight on Luminosity Measurements II. The Full Sample of Reverberation-Mapped AGNs
• An Empirical Ultraviolet Template for Iron Emission in Quasars as Derived from I Zw 1
• Reverberation Mapping of High-Luminosity Quasars: First Results
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: H$\alpha$ and H$\beta$ Reverberation Measurements From First-year Spectroscopy and Photometry
• The Lick AGN Monitoring Project: Reverberation Mapping of Optical Hydrogen and Helium Recombination Lines
• The Structure of the Broad-Line Region In Active Galactic Nuclei. II. Dynamical Modeling of Data from the AGN10 Reverberation Mapping Campaign
• The Microlensing Properties of a Sample of 87 Lensed Quasars
• Microlensing of the broad line region in 17 lensed quasars
• The Structure of the X-ray and Optical Emitting Regions of the Lensed Quasar Q 2237+0305
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: First Broad-line Hbeta and MgII Lags at z>~0.3 from six-Month Spectroscopy
• Contribution of the Disk Emission to the Broad Emission Lines in AGNs: Two-component model
• The Influence of Gravitational Microlensing on the Broad Emission Lines of Quasars
• Microlensing of the Broad Emission Line Region in the Quadruple Lens SDSS J1004+4112
• An Optical Time-Delay for the Lensed BAL Quasar HE2149-2745
• WFI J2026-4536 and WFI J2033-4723: Two New Quadruple Gravitational Lenses
• Gravitational Microlensing
• Microlensing of Quasar Broad Emission Lines: Constraints on Broad Line Region Size
• The Civ line width distribution for quasars and its implications for broad-line region dynamics and virial mass estimation
• Discovery of Two Gravitationally Lensed Quasars with Image Separations of 3 Arcseconds from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Disentangling microlensing and differential extinction in the double QSO HE0512-3329
• Integral-field spectroscopy of the quadruple QSO HE 0435-1223: Evidence for microlensing
• COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses VI. Redshift of the lensing galaxy in seven gravitationally lensed quasars
• The First FIRST Gravitationally Lensed Quasar: FBQ 0951+2635
• COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses II. SDSS J0924+0219: the redshift of the lensing galaxy, the quasar spectral variability and the Einstein rings
• Measuring Microlensing using Spectra of Multiply Lensed Quasars
• HE 0047-1756: A new gravitationally lensed double QSO
• SDSS J0806+2006 and SDSS J1353+1138: Two New Gravitationally Lensed Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Probing the Broad Line Region and the Accretion Disk in the Lensed Quasars HE0435-1223, WFI2033-4723, and HE2149-2745 using Gravitational Microlensing
• Strong Chromatic Microlensing in HE0047-1756 and SDSS1155+6346
• Recurrence of the blue wing enhancements in the high ionization lines of SDSS 1004+4112 A
• Size of the accretion disk in the gravitationally lensed quasar SDSS J1004+4112 from the statistics of microlensing magnifications
• Gravitational lens system SDSS J1339+1310: microlensing factory and time delay
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Composite Lags at $z\lesssim 1$
• The dark halo of the main lens galaxy in QSO 0957+561

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Double dark matter vision: twice the number of compact-source lenses with narrow-line lensing and the WFC3 grism
• Survey of Gravitationally lensed Objects in HSC Imaging (SuGOHI) -- VII. Discovery and Confirmation of Three Strongly Lensed Quasars
• Microlensing of the broad emission lines in 27 gravitationally lensed quasars. Broad line region structure and kinematics
• Fe III emission in quasars: evidence for a dense turbulent medium
• MUSE adaptive-optics spectroscopy confirms dual active galactic nuclei and strongly lensed systems at sub-arcsec separation
• An Improved GPU-Based Ray-Shooting Code For Gravitational Microlensing
• Spectroscopy and polarimetry of the gravitationally lensed quasar SDSS J1004+4112 with the 6m SAO RAS telescope
• Measuring Supermassive Black Hole Masses: Correlation between the Redshifts of the Fe III UV Lines and the Widths of Broad Emission Lines
• A Mass Model for the Lensing Cluster SDSS J1004+4112: Constraints From the Third Time Delay
• Continuum reverberation mapping of the quasar PG 2130+099
• Revealing the structure of the lensed quasar Q 0957+561 III. Constraints on the size of the broad-line region
• Individual Estimates of the Virial Factor in 10 Quasars: Implications on the Kinematics of the Broad Line Region
• Testing Einstein's Equivalence Principle and its Cosmological Evolution from Quasar Gravitational Redshifts
• Spectroscopy and polarimetry of the gravitationally lensed quasar Q0957+561
• First black hole mass estimation for the quadruple lensed system WGD2038-4008
• Revealing the structure of the lensed quasar Q 0957+561: III. SMBH mass via gravitational redshift
• A Second-Order Moment of Microlensing Variability as a Novel Tool in Extragalactic Research
• Size and kinematics of the CIV broad emission line region from microlensing-induced line profile distortions in two gravitationally lensed quasars
• Black Hole masses for 14 gravitational lensed quasars
• Searching for signatures of chaos in gamma-ray light curves of selected Fermi-LAT blazars
• Geometry and kinematics of the broad emission line region in the lensed quasar Q2237+0305