Study the broad line region structure of AGN emission lines across the X-SHOOTER spectra

The broad line region (BLR) dynamics of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is crucial to measure the mass of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the distant Universe. Assuming that the BLR is virialized, the reverberation mapping (RM) technique has been used for decades to resolve the size of the BLR based on the time lag of the optical/UV broad emission line light curve from the continuum light curve. Recently, the near-infrared (NIR) interferometer, VLTI/GRAVITY, is able to spatially resolve the BLR of AGNs with the broad emission line in K band. This opens up many important opportunities, including to independently measure the SMBH mass and to study the BLR structure combining the RM and GRAVITY measurements which are highly complementary. However, the two measurements are usually based on different broad lines, and the structures of different lines may not be identical. It is therefore crucial to quantitatively study the difference of the BLR structures and the physical implications. In this project, we plan to use a BLR dynamical model to analyze the broad lines in UV/optical and NIR simultaneously observed by X-SHOOTER spectrograph.

Faculty Supervisor:

Allison Man

Student:

Partner:

Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics

Discipline:

Physics

Sector:

Other

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: