Evidence for an Outer Component in the Continuum Reverberation Mapping of Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract: The continuum reverberation mapping is widely used in studying accretion disk of active galactic nuclei (AGN). While some indirect evidence and simulations indicated that the diffuse continuum, especially the strong Balmer continuum from the broad line region (BLR), may contribute to the continuum in the u/U band. Here, we present direct evidence for this contribution. In this work, we apply the ICCF-Cut method to continuum reverberation mapping to extract the possible diffuse continuum light curves of 6 AGNs with high cadence, high quality and multi-band observations. We find the existence of an outer component out of the accretion disk for each of 6 AGNs in the Swift U band. Meanwhile, similar results can be derived by JAVELIN Photometric Reverberation Mapping Model for 4 of them. The lags of the outer components are consistent with the predicted Balmer continuum lags, which are about half of the H$\beta$ lag values. Our result directly reinforces that an outer component, especially the Balmer continuum in the rest-frame u/U band, can contribute significantly to the continuum reverberation lags of AGNs.