OzDES Reverberation Mapping Program: The first Mg II lags from five years of monitoring

Understand

Reverberation mapping is a robust method to measure the masses of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) outside of the local Universe.

• Measurements of the radius -- luminosity ($R-L$) relation using the Mg II emission line are critical for determining these masses near the peak of quasar activity at $z \approx 1 - 2$, and for calibrating secondary mass estimators based on Mg II that can be applied to large samples with only single-epoch spectroscopy.
• We present the first nine Mg II lags from our five-year Australian Dark Energy Survey (OzDES) reverberation mapping program, which substantially improves the number and quality of Mg II lag measurements.
• As the Mg II feature is somewhat blended with iron emission, we model and subtract both the continuum and iron contamination from the multi-epoch spectra before analyzing the Mg II line.