scholarly journals Discovery of a relation between black hole mass and soft X-ray time lags in active galactic nuclei

2013 ◽  
Vol 431 (3) ◽  
pp. 2441-2452 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. De Marco ◽  
G. Ponti ◽  
M. Cappi ◽  
M. Dadina ◽  
P. Uttley ◽  
...  
2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (S290) ◽  
pp. 37-40
Author(s):  
O. González-Martín ◽  
S. Vaughan

AbstractWe have performed a uniform analysis of the power spectrum densities (PSDs) of 104 nearby (z<0.4) active galactic nuclei (AGN) using 209 XMM-Newton/pn observations, including several AGN classes. These PSDs span ≃ 3 decades in temporal frequencies, ranging from minutes to days. We have fitted each PSD to two models: (1) a single power-law model and (2) a bending power-law model. A fraction of 72% show significant variability. The PSD of the majority of the variable AGN was well described by a simple power-law with a mean index of α = 2.01±0.01. In 15 sources we found that the bending power law model was preferred with a mean slope of α = 3.08±0.04 and a mean bend frequency of 〈νb〉 ≃ 2 × 10−4 Hz. Only KUG 1031+398 (RE J1034+396) shows evidence for quasi-periodic oscillations. The ‘fundamental plane’ relating variability timescale, black hole mass, and luminosity is demonstrated using the new X-ray timing results presented here together with a compilation of the previously detected timescales from the literature.


2015 ◽  
Vol 808 (2) ◽  
pp. 163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hai-Wu Pan ◽  
Weimin Yuan ◽  
Xin-Lin Zhou ◽  
Xiao-Bo Dong ◽  
Bifang Liu

2021 ◽  
Vol 504 (1) ◽  
pp. 428-443
Author(s):  
K K Gupta ◽  
C Ricci ◽  
A Tortosa ◽  
Y Ueda ◽  
T Kawamuro ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs), also known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), are generally surrounded by large amounts of gas and dust. This surrounding material reprocesses the primary X-ray emission produced close to the SMBH and gives rise to several components in the broadband X-ray spectra of AGN, including a power-law possibly associated with Thomson-scattered radiation. In this work, we study the properties of this scattered component for a sample of 386 hard-X-ray-selected, nearby ($z\sim0.03$) obscured AGN from the 70-month Swift/BAT catalogue. We investigate how the fraction of Thomson-scattered radiation correlates with different physical properties of AGN, such as line-of-sight column density, X-ray luminosity, black hole mass, and Eddington ratio. We find a significant negative correlation between the scattering fraction and the column density. Based on a large number of spectral simulations, we exclude the possibility that this anticorrelation is due to degeneracies between the parameters. The negative correlation also persists when considering different ranges of luminosity, black hole mass, and Eddington ratio. We discuss how this correlation might be either due to the angle dependence of the Thomson cross-section or to more obscured sources having a higher covering factor of the torus. We also find a positive correlation between the scattering fraction and the ratio of [O iii] λ5007 to X-ray luminosity. This result is consistent with previous studies and suggests that the Thomson-scattered component is associated with the narrow-line region.


2019 ◽  
Vol 488 (1) ◽  
pp. 324-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ingram ◽  
Guglielmo Mastroserio ◽  
Thomas Dauser ◽  
Pieter Hovenkamp ◽  
Michiel van der Klis ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTWe present the publicly available model reltrans that calculates the light-crossing delays and energy shifts experienced by X-ray photons originally emitted close to the black hole when they reflect from the accretion disc and are scattered into our line of sight, accounting for all general relativistic effects. Our model is fast and flexible enough to be simultaneously fit to the observed energy-dependent cross-spectrum for a large range of Fourier frequencies, as well as to the time-averaged spectrum. This not only enables better geometric constraints than only modelling the relativistically broadened reflection features in the time-averaged spectrum, but additionally enables constraints on the mass of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei and stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We include a self-consistently calculated radial profile of the disc ionization parameter and properly account for the effect that the telescope response has on the predicted time lags. We find that a number of previous spectral analyses have measured artificially low source heights due to not accounting for the former effect and that timing analyses have been affected by the latter. In particular, the magnitude of the soft lags in active galactic nuclei may have been underestimated, and the magnitude of lags attributed to thermal reverberation in X-ray binaries may have been overestimated. We fit reltrans to the lag-energy spectrum of the Seyfert galaxy Mrk 335, resulting in a best-fitting black hole mass that is smaller than previous optical reverberation measurements (∼7 million compared with ∼14–26 million M⊙).


2018 ◽  
Vol 614 ◽  
pp. A37 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Tortosa ◽  
S. Bianchi ◽  
A. Marinucci ◽  
G. Matt ◽  
P. O. Petrucci

Context. We discuss the results of the hot corona parameters of active galactic nuclei (AGN) that have been recently measured with NuSTAR. The values taken from the literature of a sample of 19 bright Seyfert galaxies are analysed. Aims. The aim of this work is to look for correlations between coronal parameters, such as the photon index and cut-off energy (when a phenomenological model is adopted) or the optical depth and temperature (when a Comptonization model is used), and other parameters of the systems, such as the black hole mass or the Eddington ratio. Methods. We analysed the coronal parameters of the 19 unobscured, bright Seyfert galaxies that are present in the Swift/BAT 70-month catalogue and that have been observed by NuSTAR, alone or simultaneously with others X-ray observatories, such as Swift, Suzaku, or XMM-Newton. Results. We found an anti-correlation with a significance level >98% between the coronal optical depth and the coronal temperature of our sample. On the other hand, no correlation between the above parameters and the black hole mass, the accretion rate, and the intrinsic spectral slope of the sources is found.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (S312) ◽  
pp. 73-74
Author(s):  
H. Pan ◽  
W. Yuan ◽  
X.-L. Zhou ◽  
X. Dong ◽  
B. Liu

AbstractRecent studies of active galactic nuclei (AGN) found a statistical inverse scaling between the X-ray normalized excess variance σrms2 (variability amplitude) and the black hole mass spanning over MBH = 106 − 109M⊙. We present a study of this relation by including AGN with MBH = 105 − 106M⊙. It is found that the relation is no longer a simple extrapolation of the known inverse proportion, but starts to flatten around 106M⊙. This behavior can be understood by the shape of the power spectrum density of AGN and its dependence on the black hole mass.


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