Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping Project. XI. Disk-wind characteristics and contributions to the very broad emission lines of NGC 5548

Understand

In 2014 the NGC 5548 Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping campaign discovered a two-month anomaly when variations in the absorption and emission lines decorrelated from continuum variations.

• During this time the soft X-ray part of the intrinsic spectrum had been strongly absorbed by a line-of-sight (LOS) obscurer, which was interpreted as the upper part of a disk wind.
• Our first paper showed that changes in the LOS obscurer produce the decorrelation between the absorption lines and the continuum.
• A second study showed that the base of the wind shields the BLR, leading to the emission-line decorrelation.