The SDSS-V BHM RM Project: Spectral Analysis To Investigate Coordinated Variability in BAL Quasars

The question of how galaxies form and evolve lies at the heart of extragalactic research. We must understand how galaxies interact with their supermassive black holes (SMBHs) to answer this ques tion fully. Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) activity may be the result of this interaction. Quasars are commonly quite variable, and continuum and emission line variability provide us with insight into the accretion process of the AGN. Of particular interest are broad absorption lines (BALs) in quasar spectra, which have observed velocity widths greater than 2000 km s−1 and are thought to be produced by high-velocity outflows from the quasar accretion disk. By measuring the variability of these BALs, we can constrain the energy contained in quasar outflows and potential significant effects on the host galaxy. We are examining quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Reverberation Mapping field (SDSS-RM; e.g., Shen et al. 2015) and the SDSS-V Black Hole Map per survey. SDSS has observed 850 quasars in this field spectroscopically since 2014. Our focus is on a sample of ∼90 BAL quasars observed by both the SDSS-RM and BHM-RM projects. We are finalizing spectral fits using a spectral analysis software known as Prepspec, with which we will examine coordinated variability of BALs, emission lines, and the quasar continuum. We will present preliminary results, including spectral fits for the BHM-RM sample folding in SDSS-V data, and status updates of this investigation.