Broad line region echo from highly accreting intermediate-mass black hole candidate SDSS J144850.08+160803.1

First probe of intra-night variability and reverberation mapping

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
² Department for Physics and Astronomy, Heidelberg University, Im Neuenheimer Feld 226, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
³ Center for Astrophysics – Harvard and Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street MS09, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
⁴ LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France
⁵ Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow M.V. Lomonosov State University, Universitetskij pr., 13, Moscow 119234, Russia
⁶ European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschildstr. 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
⁷ Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá, Casilla 7D, Arica, Chile
⁸ Université Paris Cité, CNRS(/IN2P3), Astroparticule et Cosmologie, F-75013 Paris, France

^⋆ Corresponding author: demianenko@mpia.de

Received: 11 April 2025
Accepted: 7 August 2025

Abstract

Context. Elusive intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs; 100 M_⊙ ≤ M_BH ≤ 2 × 10⁵ M_⊙) can be used as “time-squeezing” machines, enabling studies of active galactic nucleus (AGN) geometry via reverberation mapping (RM) on much shorter timescales than their supermassive siblings.

Aims. Constraints on the broad line region (BLR) radius for IMBH candidates across a broad range of Eddington ratios help probe the unexplored faint end of the radius-luminosity (R − L) relation in AGNs. This development opens up the opportunity to build a more robust M_BH estimator. The present study is aimed at: (a) confirming a highly accreting IMBH candidate and (b) demonstrating the feasibility of the first photometric BLR RM campaign for IMBHs with high Eddington rates.

Methods. SDSS J144850.08+160803.1 (J1448+16) was identified as an IMBH candidate from a broad Hα-selected spectroscopic sample from SDSS. We carried out XMM-Newton X-ray observations to confirm its AGN status, along with narrowband Hα and broadband SDSS g′ monitoring over five months (March–July 2024) using a 60-cm telescope at the Caucasus Mountain Observatory. These time series allowed us both to probe the short-timescale variability and extract the time lag between the BLR and accretion disk (AD) continuum.

Results. XMM-Newton detected J1448+16 as a bright X-ray point source with a photon index of Γ = 2.32_−0.13^+0.15 and X-ray luminosity of L_2−10keV = (3.3^+0.5_−0.4) × 10⁴¹ erg s⁻¹, confirming its AGN activity. From the SDSS optical spectrum and X-ray properties, we estimated a BH mass of ∼(0.9 − 2.4)×10⁵ M_⊙ and Eddington rate of ∼37 − 112%. We report high-amplitude ∼55% intra-night (∼1.7 h) Hα variability for this highly accreting IMBH and extract a tentative BLR RM radius estimate of ∼1 − 8 days.

Conclusions. This work offers a proof of concept for further high-Eddington-rate IMBH variability studies and BLR RM campaigns, which will be essential for an efficient calibration of the R − L relation at the faint end.