Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Calculating Time Lags From Unevenly Sampled Light Curves, A. Zoghbi, C. Reynolds, E. M. Cackett

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Research Publications

Timing techniques are powerful tools to study dynamical astrophysical phenomena. In the X-ray band, they offer the potential of probing accretion physics down to the event horizon. Recent work has used frequency- and energy-dependent time lags as tools for studying relativistic reverberation around the black holes in several Seyfert galaxies. This was achieved due to the evenly sampled light curves obtained using XMM-Newton. Continuously sampled data are, however, not always available and standard Fourier techniques are not applicable. Here, building on the work of Miller et al., we discuss and use a maximum likelihood method to obtain frequency-dependent lags that …