Time Delay and Accretion Disk Size Measurements in the Lensed Quasar SBS?0909+532 from Multiwavelength Microlensing Analysis

2013 
We present three complete seasons and two half-seasons of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) r-band photometry of the gravitationally lensed quasar SBS?0909+532 from the U.S. Naval Observatory, as well as two seasons each of SDSS g-band and r-band monitoring from the Liverpool Robotic Telescope. Using Monte Carlo simulations to simultaneously measure the system's time delay and model the r-band microlensing variability, we confirm and significantly refine the precision of the system's time delay to , where the stated uncertainties represent the bounds of the formal 1? confidence interval. There may be a conflict between the time delay measurement and a lens consisting of a single galaxy. While models based on the Hubble Space Telescope astrometry and a relatively compact stellar distribution can reproduce the observed delay, the models have somewhat less dark matter than we would typically expect. We also carry out a joint analysis of the microlensing variability in the r and g bands to constrain the size of the quasar's continuum source at these wavelengths, obtaining log {(r s, r /cm)[cos i/0.5]1/2} = 15.3 ? 0.3 and log {(r s, g /cm)[cos i/0.5]1/2} = 14.8 ? 0.9, respectively. Our current results do not formally constrain the temperature profile of the accretion disk but are consistent with the expectations of standard thin disk theory.
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