English

Probing properties of nearly two-hundred new active galactic nuclei

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-10-08 v1

Abstract

We present a comprehensive analysis of the X-ray spectral properties of 198 newly identified active galactic nuclei (AGNs), leveraging archival data from the {\it Chandra} X-ray Observatory. All these AGNs exhibit a powerlaw spectral signature spanning a broad energy range of 0.57.00.5-7.0 keV, characterized by the photon index (Γ\Gamma) values ranging from 0.30.14+0.160.3^{+0.16}_{-0.14} to 2.540.13+0.142.54^{+0.14}_{-0.13}. Particularly, 76 of these AGNs display discernible levels of intrinsic absorption, after considering the Galactic absorption. The column densities associated with this local absorption (nHlocaln_{\rm H}^{\rm local}) are within a range of 10191022 cm2\sim 10^{19} - 10^{22}\ {\rm cm^{-2}}. We study the cosmological evolution of AGNs using the variation of nHlocaln_{\rm H}^{\rm local} and Γ\Gamma with their estimated redshift. The intrinsic spectral signature did not reveal any significant cosmological evolution; however, a deficit of hard sources at high redshift is possibly intrinsic. Our sample covers several decades of broadband intrinsic luminosity (LBintrL_{\rm B}^{\rm intr}) ranging from 4.590.41+0.41×10424.59^{+0.41}_{-0.41} \times 10^{42} to 2.40.12+0.12×1046erg s12.4^{+0.12}_{-0.12} \times 10^{46}\, {\rm erg~s}^{-1} with peak at 1.84 redshift. We also investigate the hardness-luminosity diagram (HLD) to further probe the AGNs. We conduct a sanity check by applying our findings to known AGNs, and the results are consistent with our observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.14081,
  title  = {Probing properties of nearly two-hundred new active galactic nuclei},
  author = {Samrat Ghosh and Samir Mandal and Sudip Bhattacharyya and Shivam Kumaran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.14081},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

15 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society