The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016: Velocity-resolved Hβ Lags in Luminous Seyfert Galaxies

Abstract We carried out spectroscopic monitoring of 21 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies using the Kast double spectrograph on the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory from 2016 April to 2017 May. Targeting active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with luminosities of λ L λ (5100 Å) ≈ 10 44 erg s −1 and predicted H β lags of ∼20–30 days or black hole masses of 10 7 –10 8.5 M ⊙ , our campaign probes luminosity-dependent trends in broad-line region (BLR) structure and dynamics as well as to improve calibrations for single-epoch estimates of quasar black hole masses. Here we present the first results from the campaign, including H β emission-line light curves, integrated H β lag times (8–30 days) measured against V -band continuum light curves, velocity-resolved reverberation lags, line widths of the broad H β components, and virial black hole mass estimates (10 7.1 –10 8.1 M ⊙ ). Our results add significantly to the number of existing velocity-resolved lag measurements and reveal a diversity of BLR gas kinematics at moderately high AGN luminosities. AGN continuum luminosity appears not to be correlated with the type of kinematics that its BLR gas may exhibit. Follow-up direct modeling of this data set will elucidate the detailed kinematics and provide robust dynamical black hole masses for several objects in this sample.