Geometric Distances of Quasars Measured by Spectroastrometry and Reverberation Mapping:Monte Carlo Simulations

Abstract

Recently, GRAVITY onboard the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) first spatially resolved the structure of the quasar 3C 273 with an unprecedented resolution of $\sim 10\mu$as. A new method of measuring parallax distances has been successfully applied to the quasar through joint analysis of spectroastrometry (SA) and reverberation mapping (RM) observation of its broad line region (BLR). The uncertainty of this SA and RM (SARM) measurement is about $16\%$ from real data, showing its great potential as a powerful tool for precision cosmology. In this paper, we carry out detailed analyses of mock data to study impacts of data qualities of SA observations on distance measurements and establish a quantitative relationship between statistical uncertainties of distances and relative errors of differential phases. We employ a circular disk model of BLR for the SARM analysis. We show that SARM analyses of observations generally generate reliable quasar distances, even for relatively poor SA measurements with error bars of $40\%$ at peaks of phases. Inclinations and opening angles of BLRs are the major parameters governing distance uncertainties. It is found that BLRs with inclinations $\gtrsim 10^{\circ }$ and opening angles $\lesssim 40^{\circ }$ are the most reliable regimes from SARM analysis for distance measurements. Through analysis of a mock sample of AGNs generated by quasar luminosity functions, we find that if the GRAVITY/GRAVITY+ can achieve a phase error of $0.1^{\circ }$ per baseline for targets with magnitudes $K\lesssim 11.5$, the SARM campaign can constrain $H_0$ to an uncertainty of $2\%$ by observing $60$ targets.

20 pages, 13 figures, accepted by ApJS

References in corpus (21)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
• Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheid Standards Provide a 1% Foundation for the Determination of the Hubble Constant and Stronger Evidence for Physics Beyond LambdaCDM
• A gravitational-wave standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant
• An Observational Determination of the Bolometric Quasar Luminosity Function
• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/Virgo GW170817. I. Dark Energy Camera Discovery of the Optical Counterpart
• Is Quasar Optical Variability a Damped Random Walk?
• Estimating cosmological parameters by the simulated data of gravitational waves from the Einstein Telescope
• The Radius-Luminosity Relationship Depends on Optical Spectra in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Efficient Bayesian inference for multimodal problems in cosmology
• Modeling reverberation mapping data I: improved geometric and dynamical models and comparison with cross-correlation results
• The Near-Infrared Broad Emission Line Region of Active Galactic Nuclei -- I. The Observations
• How the Dark Energy Can Reconcile \textit{Planck} with Local Determination of the Hubble Constant
• Light dark photon and fermionic dark radiation for the Hubble constant and the structure formation
• The spatially resolved broad line region of IRAS 09149-6206
• Reverberation Mapping of the Broad-line Region in NGC 5548: Evidence for Radiation Pressure?
• GRAVITY: getting to the event horizon of Sgr A*
• Differential interferometry of QSO broad line regions I: improving the reverberation mapping model fits and black hole mass estimates
• Monitoring AGNs with Hβ Asymmetry. II. Reverberation Mapping of Three Seyfert Galaxies Historically Displaying Hβ Profiles with Changing Asymmetry: Mrk 79, NGC 3227, and Mrk 841
• Robotic Reverberation Mapping of the Southern Seyfert NGC 3783
• Determining sub-parsec supermassive black hole binary orbits with infrared interferometry

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Cosmology Intertwined: A Review of the Particle Physics, Astrophysics, and Cosmology Associated with the Cosmological Tensions and Anomalies
• Spectroastrometry and Reverberation Mapping: the Mass and Geometric Distance of the Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar 3C 273
• Spectroastrometry and Reverberation Mapping of Active Galactic Nuclei. II. Measuring Geometric Distances and Black Hole Masses of Four Nearby Quasars
• The Deviation of the Broad-line Region Size Between Reverberation Mapping and Spectroastrometry
• Precision near-IR spectroscopy for understanding AGN physics and shed light on the H0 tension -- SHARP Science Book