The Temperature Profiles of Quasar Accretion Disks

Physics

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Scientific paper

We can now routinely measure the size of quasar accretion disks using gravitational microlensing of lensed quasars. At optical wavelengths we observe a size and scaling with black hole mass roughly consistent with thin disk theory but the sizes are larger than expected from the observed optical fluxes. One solution would be to use a flatter temperature profile, which we can study by measuring the wavelength dependence of the disk size over the largest possible wavelength baseline. Thus, to understand the size discrepancy and to probe closer to the inner edge of the disk we need to extend our measurements to UV wavelengths, and this can only be done with HST. For example, in the UV we should see significant changes in the optical/UV size ratio with black hole mass. We propose monitoring 5 lenses spanning a broad range of black hole masses with well-sampled ground based light curves, optical disk size measurements and known GALEX UV fluxes during Cycles 17 and 18 to expand from our current sample of two lenses. We would obtain 5 observations of each target in each Cycle, similar to our successful strategy for the first two targets.;

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