The broad-line region and dust torus size of the Seyfert 1 galaxy PGC 50427

摘要

We present the results of three-year monitoring campaigns of the z = 0.024 type 1 active Galactic nucleus (AGN) PGC 50427. Using robotic telescopes of the Universitätssternwarte Bochum near Cerro Armazones in Chile, we monitored PGC 50427 in the optical and near-infrared (NIR). Through the use of photometric reverberation mapping with broad- and narrowband filters, we determine the size of the broad-line emitting region by measuring the time delay between the variability of the continuum and the Hα emission line. The Hα emission line responds to blue continuum variations with an average rest frame lag of 19.0 ± 1.23 days. Using single epoch spectroscopy obtained with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) we determined a broad-line Hα velocity width of 1020 km s-1 and in combination with the rest frame lag and adoption of a geometric scaling factor f = 5.5, we calculate a black hole mass of MBH ~ 17 × 106 M⊙. Using the flux variation gradient method, we separate the host galaxy contribution from that of the AGN to calculate the rest frame 5100 Å luminosity at the time of our monitoring campaign. We measured small luminosity variations in the AGN (~10%) accross the three years of the monitoring campaign. The rest frame lag and the host-subtracted luminosity permit us to derive the position of PGC 50427 in the BLR size – AGN luminosity diagram, which is remarkably close to the theoretically expected relation of R ∝ L0.5. The simultaneous optical and NIR (J and Ks) observations allow us to determine the size of the dust torus through the use of dust reverberation mapping method. We find that the hot dust emission (~1800 K) lags the optical variations with an average rest frame lag of 46.2 ± 2.60 days. The dust reverberation radius and the nuclear NIR luminosity permit us to derive the position of PGC 50427 on the known τ − MV diagram. The simultaneous observations for the broad-line region and dust thermal emission demonstrate that the innermost dust torus is located outside the BLR in PGC 50427, supporting the unified scheme for AGNs.