The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016: Velocity-resolved H β Lags in Luminous Seyfert Galaxies.

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 Ă...) ≈ 10⁴⁴ erg s^âˆ'1 and predicted H β lags of ∼20â€"30 days or black hole masses of 10⁷â€"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 (8â€"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 (10^7.1â€"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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]