Accretion disc time lag distributions: Applying CREAM to simulated AGN light curves

Abstract

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) vary in their brightness across all wavelengths. Moreover, longer wavelength ultraviolet-optical continuum light curves appear to be delayed with respect to shorter wavelength light curves. A simple way to model these delays is by assuming thermal reprocessing of a variable point source (a lamp post) by a blackbody accretion disc. We introduce a new method, CREAM (Continuum REprocessed AGN Markov Chain Monte Carlo), that models continuum variations using this lamp post model. The disc light curves lag the lamp post emission with a time delay distribution sensitive to the disc temperature-radius profile and inclination.We test CREAM's ability to recover both inclination and product of black hole mass and accretion rate M M˙ , and show that the code is also able to infer the shape of the driving light curve. CREAM is applied to synthetic light curves expected from 1000 s exposures of a 17th magnitude AGN with a 2-m telescope in Sloan g and i bands with Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 500-900 depending on the filter and lunar phase.We also test CREAM on poorer quality g and i light curves with SNR = 100. We find in the high-SNR case that CREAM can recover the accretion disc inclination to within an uncertainty of 5° and an M M˙ to within 0.04 dex.