Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter EScience

Thursday, 12 September 2024, 14:00   (S13)

Disentangling the Interplay of the Inner Regions of AGNs Via Probabilistic Photometry

Iliana Isabel Cortés Pérez, Nikolaos Gianniotis, and Kai Lars Polsterer
Astroinformatics - HITS gGmbH

Galaxies that host in their centre a Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) with a mass larger than 10^8 solar masses, and a high accretion rate are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). AGNs are variable sources and their variability carries the footprint of the underlying latent activity of the central engine. The continuum emission from the accretion disk (AD) and the emission lines from the Broad Line Region (BLR) dominate the optical spectrum of AGNs. AD and BLR exhibit delayed emissions that depend on their physical properties. In contrast to the abundance of multi-band photometry from surveys such as SDSS, spectroscopic observations of AGNs over long periods are not common, for being too time consuming. We adopt a model that uses a Gaussian Process to emulate the latent activity from the SMBH that gives rise to the variability in the observed light curves. Using a simple model consisting of a power-law based continuum plus broad emission lines, we aim to estimate the delay between the AD and BLR from photometric measurements, as well as spectral properties at any observed time of the AGNs contained in the Stripe 82 catalogue. As the recovery of physical properties from photometric data is becoming increasingly important given the release of Large Area Surveys like DESI, GAIA, and LSST, our methodology seeks to provide a robust framework for reconstructing detailed spectral information and variability characteristics from photometry alone.