Related papers: RefleX: X-ray absorption and reflection in active …
The impact of feedback from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) on the cosmological evolution of the large scale structure is a long studied problem. However, it is still not well understood how the feedback energy couples to the ambient medium to…
Accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs), also known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), are generally surrounded by large amounts of gas and dust. This surrounding material reprocesses the primary X-ray emission produced close to the SMBH…
Recent work by Risaliti et al.(1999) suggests that more than half of all Seyfert 2 galaxies in the local universe are Compton-thick (N_H > 10^24 cm^-2). This has implications for AGN synthesis models for the X-ray background (XRB), the…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) show evidence for reprocessing gas, outflowing from the accreting black hole. The combined effects of absorption and scattering from the circumnuclear material likely explains the `hard excess' of X-ray emission…
The X-ray spectra of the magnetar candidates are customarily fitted with an empirical, two component model: an absorbed blackbody and a power-law. However, the physical interpretation of these two spectral components is rarely discussed. It…
Angular momentum, or spin, is a fundamental property of black holes (BHs), yet it is much more difficult to estimate than mass or accretion rate (for actively accreting systems). In recent years, high-quality X-ray observations have allowed…
"Changing look" Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are a subset of Seyfert galaxies characterized by rapid transitions between Compton-thin and Compton-thick regimes. In their Compton-thin state, the central engine is less obscured, hence…
The X-ray Background (XRB) probably originates from the integrated X-ray emission of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Modelling of its flat spectrum implies considerable absorption in most AGN. Compton down-scattering means that sources in…
We discuss the effects of a comptonizing corona on the appearance of the reflection components, and in particular of the reflection hump, in the X-rays spectra of accreting black holes. Indeed, in the framework of a thermal corona model, we…
We present a broadband X-ray analysis of a new homogeneous sample of 95 active galactic nuclei (AGN) from the 22-month Swift/BAT all-sky survey. For this sample we treated jointly the X-ray spectra observed by XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL…
The X-ray properties of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) depend on their underlying physical parameters, particularly the accretion rate. We identified eight reverberation-mapped AGNs with some of the largest known accretion rates without…
Accreting black holes show characteristic reflection features in their X-ray spectrum, including an iron K$\alpha$ line, resulting from hard X-ray continuum photons illuminating the accretion disk. The reverberation lag resulting from the…
Active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback, driven by radiation pressure on dust, is an important mechanism for efficiently coupling the accreting black hole to the surrounding environment. Recent observations confirm that X-ray selected AGN…
We present the ultraviolet to submillimetre spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the HERschel Ultra Luminous Infrared Galaxy Survey (HERUS) sample of 42 local ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) and fit them with a Markov chain…
We find a very strong correlation between the intrinsic spectral slope in X-rays and the amount of Compton reflection from a cold medium in Seyfert AGNs and in hard state of X-ray binaries with either black holes or weakly-magnetized…
The illumination pattern (or emissivity profile) of the accretion disc due to the reflection of X-rays in AGN can be understood in terms of relativistic effects on the rays propagating from a source in a corona surrounding the central black…
We fit X-ray reverberation models to Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer data from the X-ray binary Cygnus X-1 in its hard state to yield estimates for the black hole mass and the distance to the system. The rapid variability observed in the X-ray…
The narrow Fe K$\alpha$ line is one of the main signatures of the reprocessing of X-ray radiation from the material surrounding supermassive black holes, and it has been found to be omnipresent in the X-ray spectra of active galactic nuclei…
We use data of the bright atoll source 4U 1705-44 taken with XMM-Newton, BeppoSAX and RXTE both in the hard and in the soft state to perform a self-consistent study of the reflection component in this source. Although the data from these…
A new method is presented for describing vibrational effects in x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) using a combination of the classical Franck-Condon (FC) approximation and classical…