English

NuSTAR perspective on high-redshift MeV blazars

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2020-02-12 v1

Abstract

With bolometric luminosities exceeding 104810^{48} erg s1^{-1}, powerful jets and supermassive black holes at their center, MeV blazars are some of the most extreme sources in the Universe. Recently, the Fermi-Large Area Telescope detected five new γ\gamma-ray emitting MeV blazars beyond redshift z=3.1z=3.1. With the goal of precisely characterizing the jet properties of these extreme sources, we started a multiwavelength campaign to follow them up with joint NuSTAR, Swift and SARA observations. We observe six high-redshift quasars, four of them belonging to the new γ\gamma-ray emitting MeV blazars. Thorough X-ray analysis reveals spectral flattening at soft X-ray for three of these objects. The source NVSS J151002++570243 also shows a peculiar re-hardening of the X-ray spectrum at energies E>6keVE>6\,\rm keV. Adopting a one-zone leptonic emission model, this combination of hard X-rays and γ\gamma-rays enables us to determine the location of the Inverse Compton peak and to accurately constrain the jet characteristics. In the context of the jet-accretion disk connection, we find that all six sources have jet powers exceeding accretion disk luminosity, seemingly validating this positive correlation even beyond z>3z>3. Our six sources are found to have 109M10^9 \rm M_{\odot} black holes, further raising the space density of supermassive black holes in the redshift bin z=[3,4]z=[3,4].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.01956,
  title  = {NuSTAR perspective on high-redshift MeV blazars},
  author = {L. Marcotulli and V. Paliya and M. Ajello and A. Kaur and S. Marchesi and M. Rajagopal and D. Hartmann and D. Gasparrini and R. Ojha and G. Madejski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.01956},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables, 1 appendix, accepted for publication in ApJ

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