Photometric Reverberation Mapping of NGC 4395


  Haim Edri [1]  ,  Stephen Rafter [1]  ,  Shai Kaspi [1]  ,  Doron Chelouche [2]  ,  Ehud Behar [1]  
[1] Technion
[2] Haifa University

Reverberation mapping (RM) is spectroscopic technique to measure masses (M_BH) of supermassive black holes.  We present results testing a new version of the RM method using only photometric measurements to measure M_BH in the nearby, low luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGN) in NGC 4395.  Using the Wise Observatory's 1m telescope equipped with the SDSS g', r' and i' broad band filters, we monitored NGC 4395 for 10 consecutive nights and obtained 3 light curves each with over 250 data points.  The g' and r' bands include contributions from H-beta and H-alpha (respectively) plus continuum.  The i' band is essentially line free and covers a continuum only region.  The method assumes that by looking for a peak in the difference between the cross-correlation and the auto-correlation functions between filters, we can get a reliable estimate of the time lag necessary to compute M_BH.  We measure the time lag for H-alpha (from the g' and r' bands) to be 3.5^{+0.22}_{-0.55} hours, comparable to previous studies using the classic resolved line spectroscopic RM method.  The photometric method has the advantage that it suffices with short exposures when compared to spectroscopic RM, while still yielding reliable results.  Particularly for low luminosity AGN such as NGC 4395, the spectroscopic exposures at Wise would need to be prohibitively long, of the order of the lag, making RM unfeasible.