English

NuSTAR hard X-ray spectra of radio galaxies

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2020-09-29 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

NuSTAR observatory, with its 3 - 78 keV broadband spectral coverage, enables the detections of the high-energy cutoff in a number of active galaxies, including several individual radio loud ones. In this work we present systematic and uniform analyses of 55 NuSTAR spectra for a large sample of 28 radio galaxies, 20 of which are FR II galaxies. We perform spectral fitting to measure the high energy cut-off EcutE_{cut}, photon index Γ\Gamma, reflection factor R and Fe Kα\alpha line equivalent width. Measurements of EcutE_{cut} are given for 13 sources, and lower limits for the rest. We find those EcutE_{cut} non-detections could primarily be attributed to the obviously smaller net photon counts in their spectra. This indicates that the NuSTAR spectra of the majority of our sample are dominated by the thermal corona emission, and the EcutE_{cut} distribution of the sample is indistinguishable from that of a radio quiet one in literature. The flatter NuSTAR spectra we observed, comparing with radio quiet sources, are thus unlikely due to jet contamination. The radio galaxies also show weaker X-ray reflection (both in R and Fe Kα\alpha line EW) comparing with radio quiet ones. Combining with the radio quiet sample we see a correlation between R and EW, but with considerably large scatter. Notably, the radio loud and quiet sources appear to follow a common Γ\Gamma - R correlation trend, supporting the outflowing corona model for both populations in which higher bulk outflowing velocity yields weaker reflection and flatter X-ray slope.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.03293,
  title  = {NuSTAR hard X-ray spectra of radio galaxies},
  author = {Jia-lai Kang and Jun-xian Wang and Wen-yong Kang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03293},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages, 11 figures, 6 tables, accepted by ApJ