SDSS quasars Balmer emission lines Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Liu X.
  2. Shen Y.
  3. Bian F.
  4. Loeb A.
  5. Tremaine S.
  6. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

A small fraction of quasars have long been known to show bulk velocity offsets (of a few hundred to thousands of km/s) in the broad Balmer lines with respect to the systemic redshift of the host galaxy. Models to explain these offsets usually invoke broad-line region gas kinematics/asymmetry around single black holes (BHs), orbital motion of massive (~sub-parsec (sub-pc)) binary black holes (BBHs), or recoil BHs, but single-epoch spectra are unable to distinguish between these scenarios. The line-of-sight (LOS) radial velocity (RV) shifts from long-term spectroscopic monitoring can be used to test the BBH hypothesis. We have selected a sample of 399 quasars with kinematically offset broad H{beta} lines from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Seventh Data Release quasar catalog, and have conducted second-epoch optical spectroscopy for 50 of them. Combined with the existing SDSS spectra, the new observations enable us to constrain the LOS RV shifts of broad H{beta} lines with a rest-frame baseline of a few years to nearly a decade. While previous work focused on objects with extreme velocity offset (>10^3^ km/s), we explore the parameter space with smaller (a few hundred km/s) yet significant offsets (99.7% confidence). Using cross-correlation analysis, we detect significant (99% confidence) radial accelerations in the broad H{beta} lines in 24 of the 50 objects, of ~10-200 km/s/yr with a median measurement uncertainty of ~10 km/s/yr, implying a high fraction of variability of the broad-line velocity on multi-year timescales. We suggest that 9 of the 24 detections are sub-pc BBH candidates, which show consistent velocity shifts independently measured from a second broad line (either H{alpha} or Mg II) without significant changes in the broad-line profiles. Combining the results on the general quasar population studied in Paper I (Shen et al. 2013ApJ...775...49S), we find a tentative anti-correlation between the velocity offset in the first-epoch spectrum and the average acceleration between two epochs, which could be explained by orbital phase modulation when the time separation between two epochs is a non-negligible fraction of the orbital period of the motion causing the line displacement. We discuss the implications of our results for the identification of sub-pc BBH candidates in offset-line quasars and for the constraints on their frequency and orbital parameters.

Keywords
  1. quasars
  2. spectroscopy
  3. narrow-band-photometry
  4. atomic-spectroscopy
  5. redshifted
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2014ApJ...789..140L
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/789/140
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/789/140
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.17890140

Access

Web browser access HTML
http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/789/140
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/789/140
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/789/140
IVOA Table Access TAP
http://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).
IVOA Cone Search SCS
For use with a cone search client (e.g., TOPCAT).
http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/789/140/table1?
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/789/140/table1?
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/789/140/table1?

History

2017-03-17T15:45:09Z
Resource record created
2017-03-17T15:45:09Z
Created
2023-12-19T09:24:40Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr