Monday, December 12, 2011

1107.0982 (Laura J. Hainline et al.)

A New Microlensing Event in the Doubly-Imaged Quasar Q0957+561    [PDF]

Laura J. Hainline, Christopher W. Morgan, J. N. Beach, C. S. Kochanek, Hugh C. Harris, T. Tilleman, Ross Fadely, Emilio E. Falco, T. X. Le
We present evidence for ultraviolet/optical microlensing in the gravitationally lensed quasar Q0957+561. We combine new measurements from our optical monitoring campaign at the United States Naval Observatory, Flagstaff (USNO) with measurements from the literature and find that the time-delay-corrected r-band flux ratio m_A - m_B has increased by ~0.1 magnitudes over a period of five years beginning in the fall of 2005. We apply our Monte Carlo microlensing analysis procedure to the composite light curves, obtaining a measurement of the optical accretion disk size, log {(r_s/cm)[cos(i)/0.5]^{1/2}} = 16.2^{+0.5}_{-0.6}, that is consistent with the quasar accretion disk size - black hole mass relation.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.0982

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