Speaker
Description
Reverberation mapping has been successful in measuring the masses of quasars under the assumption that the gas in the broad-line region (BLR) is moving in orbits dominated by gravity. Within the last two decades, velocity-resolved reverberation mapping has unveiled a diversity of non-virial kinematics in the BLR of quasars, putting pressure on the enterprise of black hole mass estimation. This is especially apparent in the case of the hyper-variable quasar RM160, where the dramatic radial-velocity shifts have been interpreted as inflow onto the BLR. I will show velocity-resolved reverberation mapping of RM160, which represents the first of its kind for the SDSS-RM/BHM-RM dataset. These results demonstrate how the high-cadence, long-duration, and multi-epoch time domain spectroscopy of SDSS-RM/BHM-RM is shedding new light on the detailed physics of the gas near luminous quasars.
