Testing physical scenarios for the reflection features of type-1 AGN using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR simultaneous observations
Abstract
Above 3 keV, the X-ray spectrum of the active galactic nuclei (AGN) is characterized by the intrinsic continuum and compton reflection features. For type-1 AGN, several regions could contribute to the reflection. In order to investigate the nature of the reflecting medium, we perform a systematic analysis of the reflector using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observations of a sample of 22 type-1 AGN. We create a baseline model which includes Galactic absorption and an intrinsically absorbed power-law plus a reflection model. We test a set of nine reflection models in a sub-sample of five objects. Based on these results, we select three models to be tested on the entire sample, accounting for distinct physical scenarios: neutral/distant reflection, ionized/relativistic reflection, and neutral/distant+ionized/relativistic reflection, namely hybrid model. We find that 18 sources require the reflection component to fit their spectra. Among them, 67 prefer the hybrid model. Neutral and ionized models are equally preferred by three sources. We conclude that both the neutral/distant reflector most probably associated with the inner edges of the torus and the ionized/relativistic reflector associated with the accretion disk are required to describe the reflection in type-1 AGN.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.01992,
title = {Testing physical scenarios for the reflection features of type-1 AGN using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR simultaneous observations},
author = {César Ivan Victoria-Ceballos and Omaira González-Martín and Josefa Masegosa and Anna Lia Longinotti and Donaji Esparza-Arredondo and Natalia Osorio-Clavijo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.01992},
year = {2023}
}