English

Chandra Detection of Three X-ray Bright Quasars at z>5

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2021-01-27 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We report Chandra detection of three UV bright radio quiet quasars at z5z\gtrsim5. We have collected a sufficient number of photons to extract an X-ray spectrum of each quasar to measure their basic X-ray properties, such as the X-ray flux, power law photon index (Γ\Gamma), and optical-to-X-ray spectral slope (αOX\alpha_{\rm OX}). J074749+115352 at z=5.26z=5.26 is the X-ray brightest radio-quiet quasar at z>5z>5. It may have a short timescale variation (on a timescale of 3800 s\sim3800\rm~s in the observer's frame, or 600 s\sim600\rm~s in the rest frame) which is however largely embedded in the statistical noise. We extract phase folded spectra of this quasar. There are two distinguishable states: a "high soft" state with an average X-ray flux 2.7\sim2.7 times of the "low hard" state, and a significantly steeper X-ray spectral slope (Γ=2.400.32+0.33\Gamma=2.40_{-0.32}^{+0.33} vs 1.780.24+0.251.78_{-0.24}^{+0.25}). We also compare the three quasars detected in this paper to other quasar samples. We find that J074749+115352, with a SMBH mass of MSMBH1.8×109 MM_{\rm SMBH}\approx1.8\times10^9\rm~M_\odot and an Eddington ratio of λEdd2.3\lambda_{\rm Edd}\approx2.3, is extraordinarily X-ray bright. It has an average αOX=1.46±0.02\alpha_{\rm OX}=-1.46\pm0.02 and a 2-10 keV bolometric correction factor of Lbol/L210keV=42.4±5.8L_{\rm bol}/L_{\rm2-10keV}=42.4\pm5.8, both significantly depart from some well defined scaling relations. We compare Γ\Gamma of the three quasars to other samples at different redshifts, and do not find any significant redshift evolution based on the limited sample of z>5z>5 quasars with reliable measurements of the X-ray spectral properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.02358,
  title  = {Chandra Detection of Three X-ray Bright Quasars at z>5},
  author = {Jiang-Tao Li and Feige Wang and Jinyi Yang and Yuchen Zhang and Yuming Fu and Fuyan Bian and Joel N. Bregman and Xiaohui Fan and Qiong Li and Xue-Bing Wu and Xiaodi Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.02358},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication by ApJ