Program: GS-2015A-Q-17

Title:Spectroscopic Follow-Up of Variability Selected Binary Supermassive Black Hole Candidates
PI:Tingting Liu
Co-I(s): Suvi Gezari

Abstract

Hydrodynamical simulations of a binary supermassive black hole system show that mass accretion onto the circumbinary disk could be strongly modulated due to the orbital motion, which would result in periodic variability in luminous quasars. Motivated by the science goal of searching for such variability signatures, we selected a sample of variable quasars in the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) Medium Deep (MD) 09 field, 13 out of which show apparent periodic behavior from our periodogram and light curve analyses. We propose a pilot spectroscopic study of our 6 brightest SMBHB candidates, in order to understand the physical properties of these quasars, such as luminosity, total black hole mass, and rest-frame time scale.

Publications using this program's data