Abstract
Quasars, or active galactic nuclei, are the galactic supermassive black holes which have been observed to be accreting matter and emitting light. Quasar outflows are gas which is being ejected away from the central supermassive black hole, evidenced by blueshifted absorption lines in the ultraviolet portion of the quasar spectrum.
The accretion disk wind model requires that these outflows originate very close to the black hole, but the best available measurements suggest these outflows must be at a prohibitively large distance, more that ten thousand times farther away than the accretion disk wind model.
The photoionization modeling code Cloudy was used to simulate these outflows in order to determine what physical parameters could reproduce the best available measurements in the literature while assuming the small distances required by the accretion disk wind model.
The lumionsity and x-ray flux of the simulated quasar along with the number density and the total column density of the outflow gas were varied widely in the search for a suitable combination of physical conditions.
A large range of conditions were found to match the ionic column density measurements found in the literature while satisfying the small distance consistent with the accretion disk wind model.
This broad set of models is paired with additional constraints to determine what conditions might reasonably be expected to occur in these quasar outflows.