Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Sdss-Rm Project: Uv/Optical Accretion Disk Measurements For Supermassive Black Holes With Hubble Space Telescope, Megan Sturm

University Scholar Projects

We report accretion-disk structure measurements for eight rapidly accreting supermassive black holes selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping project sample. Reverberation mapping uses light echoes to measure disk size from the time lag between variability in the inner/hotter and outer/cooler disk emission. We use Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet observations coordinated with optical monitoring from the Liverpool Telescope and Las Cumbres Observatory. We find ten significant UV/optical lags for five out of the eight total targets. Through these time lags, we study the accretion disk as a function of disk size, temperature profile and radiative efficiency. We find …