I Congreso de Postgrado fcfm: ingeniería, ciencias e innovación

Santiago, 10 al 12 de agosto, 2022 A S T RONOM Í A 01 24 TESTING THE EFFICACY OF THE SEARCH OF INTERMEDIATE MASS BLACK HOLES THROUGH OPTICAL VARIABILITY Paula Cáceres Burgos¹*, Paulina Lira ² ¹Departamento de Astronomía, Universid d de Chile, Santiago, Chile. ²Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile Santiago, Chile. *Email: pcaceres@uchile.cl ABSTRACT Intermediate Mass Black Holes (IMBHs; 10^2-10^6 solar masses) are BHs extremely hard to detect observationally, which causes a gap in the BH mass function. As a result, the constraints for IMBH seed mechanisms are poorly known, hence the importance of proposing new techniques to find them. In this research, we test the efficacy of a method developed by Martinez-Palomera [1] that searches for active IMBH candidates by selecting sources with fast optical variability (i.e., g band time series) from the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS). Similar to the well- known galaxy NGC 4395, which holds a ~4x10^5 M⊙ IMBH. This selection composes the Search for Intermediate mass Black holes in Nearby Galaxies (SIBLING) survey. For the methods, we crossmatched the SIBLING sources with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and did a spectral search for broad Balmer emission lines in their spectra, a trademark of unobscured active BHs. We repeat this method for non-variable sources from HiTS as well. Results suggest no significant difference in the number of sources with spectral signatures of an active BHbetween SIBLING and the non-variable sample. Additionally, with the support of the LSST Science Pipeline, we revisit the candidates’ photometric analysis by applying Image Subtraction [2], a method that subtracts a deep template image with the science images. Results for the latter are under development, but preliminary results show that it is effective for removing stellar continuum radiation, which generally contaminates the active IMBH signal. AGRADECIMIENTOS Agradezcoel apoyodel DepartamentodeAstronomíade laUniversidaddeChile, como tambiénal núcleomilenioTITANS. REFERENCIAS [1] Martínez-Palomera J., Lira P., Bhalla-Ladd I., Förster F., Plotkin R. M., 2020,The Astrophysical Journal, 889, 113 [2] Alard C., 2000, A&AS, 144, 363