Quasar Structure from Microlensing in Gravitationally Lensed Quasars

Details Quasar Structure from Microlensing in Gravitationally Lensed Quasars Quasar Structure from Microlensing in Gravitationally Lensed Quasars

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21111206m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #112.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.942

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

I investigate microlensing in gravitationally lensed quasars and discuss the use of its signal to probe quasar structure on small angular scales. I describe our lensed quasar optical monitoring program and RETROCAM, the optical camera I built for the 2.4m Hiltner telescope to monitor lensed quasars. I use the microlensing variability observed in 11 gravitationally lensed quasars to show that the accretion disk size at 2500Å is related to the black hole mass by log(R2500/cm) = (15.70±0.16) + (0.64±0.18)log(MBH/109M&sun;). This scaling is consistent with the expectation from thin disk theory (R ∝ MBH2/3), but it implies that black holes radiate with relatively low efficiency, log(η) = -1.54±0.36 + log(L/LE) where η=L/(Mdotc2). With one exception, these sizes are larger by a factor of 4 than the size needed to produce the observed 0.8µm quasar flux by thermal radiation from a thin disk with the same T ∝ R-3/4 temperature profile. More sophisticated disk models are clearly required, particularly as our continuing observations improve the precision of the measurements and yield estimates of the scaling with wavelength and accretion rate.
This research made extensive use of a Beowulf computer cluster obtained through the Cluster Ohio program of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Support for program HST-GO-9744 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS-5-26666.

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