Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 493, Issue 4, Pages 5773-5787Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa645
Keywords
black hole physics; line: profiles; galaxies: active; quasars: general
Categories
Funding
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
- NSF [AST1715579]
- U.S. Department of Energy
- U.S. National Science Foundation
- Ministry of Science and Education of Spain
- Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- NationalCenter for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago
- Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University
- Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas AM University
- Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos
- Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
- Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico
- Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- National Science Foundation [AST-1138766, AST-1536171, AST-1238877]
- MINECO [AYA201571825, ESP2015-66861, FPA2015-68048, SEV-2016-0588, SEV2016-0597, MDM-2015-0509]
- ERDF funds from the European Union
- CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya
- European Research Council under the European Union [240672, 291329, 306478]
- Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ci enciae Tecnologia (INCT) e-Universe (CNPq) [465376/2014-2]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science
- University of Arizona
- Brazilian Participation Group
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Florida
- French Participation Group
- German Participation Group
- Harvard University
- Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
- Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group
- Johns Hopkins University
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
- New Mexico State University
- New York University
- Ohio State University
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of Portsmouth
- Princeton University
- Spanish Participation Group
- University of Tokyo
- University of Utah
- Vanderbilt University
- University of Virginia
- University of Washington
- Yale University
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NNX08AR22G]
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We present new Gemini/GMOS optical spectroscopy of 16 extreme variability quasars (EVQs) that dimmed bymore than 1.5mag in the g band between the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Survey epochs (separated by a few years in the quasar rest frame). These EVQs are selected from quasars in the SDSS Stripe 82 region, covering a redshift range of 0.5 < z < 2.1. Nearly half of these EVQs brightened significantly (by more than 0.5 mag in the g band) in a few years after reaching their previous faintest state, and some EVQs showed rapid (non-blazar) variations of greater than 1-2 mag on time-scales of only months. To increase sample statistics, we use a supplemental sample of 33 EVQs with multi-epoch spectra from SDSS that cover the broad Mg II lambda 2798 line. Leveraging on the large dynamic range in continuum variability between the multi-epoch spectra, we explore the associated variations in the broad MgII line, whose variability properties have not been well studied before. The broad MgII flux varies in the same direction as the continuum flux, albeit with a smaller amplitude, which indicates at least some portion of Mg II is reverberating to continuum changes. However, the full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of Mg II does not vary accordingly as continuum changes for most objects in the sample, in contrast to the case of the broad Balmer lines. Using the width of broad MgII to estimate the black hole mass with single epoch spectra therefore introduces a luminosity-dependent bias.
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