Accretion Disk Size and Updated Time-delay Measurements in the Gravitationally Lensed Quasar SDSS J165043.44+425149.3

Abstract

We analyze variability in 15-season optical lightcurves from the doubly imaged lensed quasar SDSS J165043.44+425149.3 (SDSS1650), comprising five seasons of monitoring data from the Maidanak Observatory (277 nights in total, including the two seasons of data previously presented in Vuissoz et al.), five seasons of overlapping data from the Mercator telescope (269 nights), and 12 seasons of monitoring data from the US Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station at lower cadence (80 nights). We update the 2007 time-delay measurement for SDSS1650 with these new data, finding a time delay of ${\rm{\Delta }}{t}_{\mathrm{AB}}=-{55.1}_{-3.7}^{+4.0}$ days, with image A leading image B. We analyze the microlensing variability in these lightcurves using a Bayesian Monte Carlo technique to yield measurements of the size of the accretion disk at λ _rest = 2420 Å, finding a half-light radius of log( r _1/2 /cm) = ${16.19}_{-0.58}^{+0.38}$ assuming a 60° inclination angle. This result is unchanged if we model 30% flux contamination from the broad-line region. We use the width of the Mg ii line in the existing Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectra to estimate the mass of this system’s supermassive black hole, finding M _BH = 2.47 × 10 ^9 M _⊙ . We confirm that the accretion disk size in this system, whose black hole mass is on the very high end of the M _BH scale, is fully consistent with the existing quasar accretion disk size–black hole mass relation.

Keywords

• Quasar microlensing
• Quasars
• Gravitational lensing
• Gravitational microlensing