English

Active galaxy 4U 1344-60: did the relativistic line disappear?

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-06-11 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

X-ray bright active galactic nuclei represent a unique astrophysical laboratory for studying accretion physics around super-massive black holes. 4U 1344-60 is a bright Seyfert galaxy which revealed relativistic reflection features in the archival XMM-Newton observation. We present the spectroscopic results of new data obtained with the Suzaku satellite and compare them with the previous XMM-Newton observation. The X-ray continuum of 4U 1344-60 can be well described by a power-law component with the photon index ~ 1.7 modified by a fully and a partially covering local absorbers. We measured a substantial decrease of the fraction of the partially absorbed radiation from around 45% in the XMM-Newton observation to less than 10% in the Suzaku observation while the power-law slope remains constant within uncertainties. The iron line in the Suzaku spectrum is relatively narrow, σ=(0.08±0.02)\sigma=(0.08 \pm 0.02) keV, without any suggestion for relativistic broadening. Regarding this, we interpret the iron line in the archival XMM-Newton spectrum as a narrow line of the same width plus an additional red-shifted emission around 6.1 keV. No evidence of the relativistic reflection is present in the Suzaku spectra. The detected red-shifted iron line during the XMM-Newton observation could be a temporary feature either due to locally enhanced emission or decreased ionisation in the innermost accretion flow.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1209.4068,
  title  = {Active galaxy 4U 1344-60: did the relativistic line disappear?},
  author = {Jiri Svoboda and Stefano Bianchi and Matteo Guainazzi and Giorgio Matt and Enrico Piconcelli and Vladimir Karas and Michal Dovciak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.4068},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

10 pages, 11 figures, accepted to A&A