English

Confirmation of intermediate-mass black holes candidates with X-ray observations

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2022-09-28 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

The origin of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galaxy centers still remains uncertain. There are two possible ways of their formation - from massive (105106M10^5 - 10^6 M_{\odot}) and low-mass (100M100 M_{\odot}) BH nuclei. The latter scenario should leave behind a large number of intermediate mass black holes (IMBH, 102105M10^2 - 10^5 M_{\odot}). The largest published sample of bona-fide IMBH-powered AGN contains 10 objects confirmed in X-ray. Here we present a new sample of 15 bona-fide IMBHs, obtained by confirming the optically selected IMBH candidates by the presence of radiation from the galactic nucleus in the X-ray range, which increases the number of confirmed IMBHs at the centers of galaxies by 2.5 times. In the same way, 99 black holes with masses of 2105106M2\cdot10^5 - 10^6 M_{\odot} were confirmed. The sources of X-ray data were publicly available catalogs, archives of data, and our own observations on XMM-Newton, Chandra and Swift. The Eddington coefficients for 30% of the objects from both samples turned out to be close to critical, from 0.5 to 1, which is an unusually high fraction. Also for the first time for light-weight SMBH the correlations between the luminosity in the [OIII] emission line or the broad component of the HαH\alpha line and the luminosity in the X-ray range were plotted.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.01075,
  title  = {Confirmation of intermediate-mass black holes candidates with X-ray observations},
  author = {Victoria Toptun and Igor Chilingarian and Kirill Grishin and Ivan Katkov and Ivan Zolotukhin and Vladimir Goradzhanov and Mariia Demianenko and Ivan Kuzmun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.01075},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures. Astronomy at the epoch of multimessenger studies. Proceedings of the VAK-2021 conference, Aug 23-28, 2021 - Moscow, 2021