Supermassive Black Holes with High Accretion Rates in Active Galactic Nuclei. XII. Reverberation Mapping Results for 15 PG Quasars from a Long-Duration High-Cadence Campaign

Abstract

We present the first results from long-term high-cadence spectroscopic monitoring of 15 PG quasars with relatively strong Fe II emission as a part of a broader reverberation mapping campaign performed with the Calar Alto Observatory 2.2m telescope. The $V$-band, 5100 \r{A} continuum, and H$\beta$ broad emission line light curves were measured for a set of quasars for between dozens to more than a hundred epochs from May 2017 to July 2020. Accurate time lags between the variations of the H$\beta$ broad line fluxes and the optical continuum strength are obtained for all 15 quasars, ranging from $17.0_{-3.2}^{+2.5}$ to $95.9_{-23.9}^{+7.1}$ days in the rest frame. The virial masses of the central supermassive black holes are derived for all 15 quasars, ranging between $0.50_{-0.19}^{+0.18}$ and $19.17_{-2.73}^{+2.98}$ in units of $10^7 M_\odot$. For 11 of the objects in our sample, this is the first reverberation analysis published. Of the rest, two objects have been the subject of previous reverberation studies, but we determine time lags for these that are only half as long as found in the earlier investigations, which had only been able to sample much more sparsely. The remaining two objects have previously been monitored with high sampling rates. Our results here are consistent with the earlier findings in the sense that the time lag and the line width vary inversely consistent with virialization.