Correlated X-ray/ultraviolet/optical variability and the nature of accretion disc in the bare Seyfert 1 galaxy Fairall 9

We study the multiwavelength variability of the bare Seyfert 1 galaxy Fairall 9 using Swift monitoring observations consisting of 165 usable pointings spanning nearly two years and covering six ultraviolet (UV)/optical bands and X-rays. Fairall 9 is highly variable in all bands though the variability amplitude decreases from X-ray to optical bands. The variations in theXray and UV/optical bands are strongly correlated. Our reverberation mapping analysis using the JAVALIN tool shows that the variation in the UV/optical bands lag behind the variations in the Xray band by similar to 2-10 d. These lag measurements strongly suggest that the optical/UV variations aremainly caused by variations in theX-rays, and the origin ofmost of the optical/UV emission is X-ray reprocessing. The observed lags are found to vary as tau proportional to lambda(1.36 +/- 0.13), consistent with the prediction, tau proportional to lambda(4/3), for X-ray reprocessing in a standard accretion disc. However, the predicted lags for a standard accretion disc with X-ray reprocessing using the black hole mass (M-BH similar to 2.6 x 10(8) M-circle dot) estimated from the reverberation mapping of broad emission lines and the accretion rate relative to the Eddington rate (m(E) = 0.02) are shorter than the observed lags. These observations suggest that the accretion disc in Fairall 9 is larger than that predicted by the standard disc model, and confirm similar findings in a few other Seyfert 1 galaxies such as NGC 5548.