Zooming In on Quasar Accretion Disks Using Chromatic Microlensing

Details Zooming In on Quasar Accretion Disks Using Chromatic Microlensing Zooming In on Quasar Accretion Disks Using Chromatic Microlensing

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21360805b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #608.05

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The optical and ultraviolet continuum from quasars comes from an accretion disk around the central black hole; blue light from a compact region and red light from a more extended region. We currently cannot resolve these accretion disks, but microlensing gives us a way to probe their color structure. Quasars that are multiply imaged by an intervening galaxy often undergo magnification anomalies due to microlensing by the stars in the galaxy. These anomalies depend on the size of the source, leading to a chromatic trend in the strength of the anomalies. We present broadband observations of 12 lensed quasars in 8 filters, and measure the size of the accretion disks as a function of wavelength by exploiting this chromatic dependence. The measured slopes appear to be consistent with a standard thin disk, but there are hints that the size of the disks may be larger than expected.
We gratefully acknowledge support from the US NSF grant AST-0602010.

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