Siam Physics Congress 2015

TNT Photometric Reverberation Mapping campaign of High-z Quasars

20 May 2015, 14:00

3h 30m

Board: AST-01

Poster presentation Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Cosmology Poster-1

Speaker

Ms Grittiya Pongsupa (Department of Physics and Materials Science, Faculty of Science, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand)

Description

Motivated by the upcoming photometric surveys that will cover a broad range of wavelengths and regularly monitor a fair fraction of the sky with good photometric accuracy (e.g. the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST), we aim to provide proof-of-concept that photometric reverberation mapping of the Broad Line Region (BLR) in quasars is feasible at high-z and fainter magnitudes than that already shown by previous study. This technique is very important if we were to determine the masses of Super Massive Black Holes (SMBH) powering the high-z quasars where the traditional spectroscopic Reverberation Mapping (RM) method would fail. Here, we will describe our high-z quasar photometric reverberation mapping campaign (PI: U. Sawangwit) being carried out with the 2.4-meters Thai National Telescope (TNT) at Doi Inthanon. Our selection criteria have been designed to ensure the quasar BLR sizes and hence their lag time is well covered by the observing season of the TNT. This results in a sample of 30 spectrally confirmed quasars, selected from SDSS-III BOSS survey to be further studied with the Photometric RM during the 2014-2015 observing season. Due to the magnitude limited nature of the spectroscopic survey, the z > 1.5 quasars are intrinsically very luminous and therefore have very long lag time (and large BLR size), to ensure our survey remain complete we hence limit our quasar sample to z < 1.5, g ≤ 21.5mag and the inferred BLR size from R-L relation to 60 light-day.