OzDES Reverberation Mapping Program: H${\hat{I}}^2$ lags from the 6-year survey

Abstract

Reverberation mapping measurements have been used to constrain the relationship between the size of the broad-line region and luminosity of active galactic nuclei (AGN). This $R-L$ relation is used to estimate single-epoch virial black hole masses, and has been proposed for use to standardise AGN to determine cosmological distances. We present reverberation measurements made with H${\hat{I}}^2$ from the six-year Australian Dark Energy Survey (OzDES) Reverberation Mapping Program. We successfully recover reverberation lags for eight AGN at $0.12<z<0.71$, probing higher redshifts than the bulk of H${\hat{I}}^2$ measurements made to date. Our fit to the $R-L$ relation has a slope of $\hat{I}\pm =0.41\pm 0.03$ and an intrinsic scatter of $\ddot{I}ƒ=0.23\pm 0.02$ dex. The results from our multi-object spectroscopic survey are consistent with previous measurements made by dedicated source-by-source campaigns, and with the observed dependence on accretion rate. Future surveys, including LSST, TiDES and SDSS-V, which will be revisiting some of our observed fields, will be able to build on the results of our first-generation multi-object reverberation mapping survey.

Published in MNRAS