English

Dependence of the broad Fe K$\alpha$ line on the physical parameters of AGN

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2016-10-03 v1

Abstract

In this paper, the dependence of the broad Fe Kα\alpha line on the physical parameters of AGN, such as the black hole mass MBHM_{BH}, accretion rate (equivalently represented by Eddington ratio λEdd\lambda_{Edd}), and optical classification, is investigated by applying the X-ray spectra stacking method to a large sample of AGN which have well measured optical parameters. A broad line feature is detected (>3σ>3\sigma) in the stacked spectra of the high λEdd\lambda_{Edd} sub-sample (logλEdd>0.9\log\lambda_{Edd}>-0.9). The profile of the broad line can be well fitted with relativistic broad line model, with the line energy consistent with highly ionized Fe Kα\alpha line (i.e. Fe xxvi). A model consisting of multiple narrow lines cannot be ruled out, however. We found hints that the Fe K line becomes broader as the λEdd\lambda_{Edd} increases. No broad line feature is shown in the sub-sample of broad-line Seyfert 1 (BLS1) galaxies and in the full sample, while a broad line might be present, though at low significance, in the sub-sample of narrow-line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) galaxies. We find no strong dependence of the broad line on black hole masses. Our results indicate that the detection/properties of the broad Fe Kα\alpha line may strongly depend on λEdd\lambda_{Edd}, which can be explained if the ionization state and/or truncation radius of the accretion disc changes with λEdd\lambda_{Edd}. The non-detection of the broad line in the BLS1 sub-sample can be explained if the the average EW of the relativistic Fe Kα\alpha line is weak or/and the fraction of sources with relativistic Fe Kα\alpha line is small in BLS1 galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.09564,
  title  = {Dependence of the broad Fe K$\alpha$ line on the physical parameters of AGN},
  author = {Zhu Liu and Weimin Yuan and Youjun Lu and Francisco J. Carrera and Serena Falocco and Xiao-Bo Dong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.09564},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

12 pages, 9 figures, Published in MNRAS