Princeton University Thunch Talk

Abstract: AGN variability presents a unique way to investigate the motion and structure of accreted material onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) across cosmic time. Reverberation mapping (RM) is a technique which uses this variability to provide estimates of SMBH masses out to high-redshift, important for theories of SMBH growth. RM can be extended to model the physical properties of the accreted gas with long-baseline, high-cadence, simultaneous spectroscopy and photometry, such as with modern surveys like SDSS-V and the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. I will discuss recent results of modeling the gas geometry and kinematics in a particular AGN with SDSS-V, comparing to theoretical predictions. Extensions to current models will more accurately determine SMBH properties, especially when performed on high-redshift AGN samples via JWST. I will also mention recent work in investigating the variability of “little red dots”, an interesting population of non-varying sources, possibly AGNs, seen at high-redshift with JWST.