Long-Term Double-Peaked Line Profile Variability in AGNs and Accretion Disk Models for 3C 390.3 and 3C 332

Details Long-Term Double-Peaked Line Profile Variability in AGNs and Accretion Disk Models for 3C 390.3 and 3C 332 Long-Term Double-Peaked Line Profile Variability in AGNs and Accretion Disk Models for 3C 390.3 and 3C 332

May 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999aas...194.7302g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 194th AAS Meeting, #73.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 31, p.950

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

Compelling dynamical evidence for the accretion disks thought to power active galactic nuclei comes from the subset of broad-line radio galaxies that emit double-peaked Balmer lines with FWHMs from 16,000 to 30,000 km s(-1) . We present double-peaked Hα spectra collected over a twenty year baseline for two of these objects, 3C 390.3 and 3C 332, and discuss trends in their dramatic profile variability on timescales of a few months to years. We review the reasons why the observed variability must be due to dynamical processes in the emission-line region, and not reveberation (light-echo) effects. We then investigate models of the long-term variability as the rotation of a spiral emissivity perturbation on a Keplerian accretion disk, and find that they can successfully reproduce the detailed profile variations of 3C 332, but only roughly reproduce the trends in profile variability of 3C 390.3. >From the best-fit models we derive rotation periods for the spiral patterns of about 20 years for 3C 332 and 20-30 years for 3C 390.3, but these times are considerably shorter than the predicted periods of one-armed normal modes of such disks in linear perturbation theory. However, the observed profile variations are of about 30-50%, so the applicability of linear theory may be questioned. Only emissivity perturbations that have the form of a one-armed spiral can provide the degree of nonaxisymmetry needed to cause the observed profile variations; higher order perturbations are too symmetric.

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