Coronal Properties of Swift/BAT-selected Seyfert 1 AGNs Observed with NuSTAR
Abstract
The NuSTAR observatory, with its high sensitivity in hard X-rays, has enabled detailed broadband modeling of the X-ray spectra of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), thereby allowing constraints to be placed on the high-energy cutoff of the X-ray coronal continuum. We investigate the spectral properties of a sample of 46 NuSTAR-observed Seyfert 1 AGNs selected from the Swift/Burst Alert Telescope 70 month hard X-ray survey. Our measurements of the high-energy cutoff of the continuum from modeling the NuSTAR X-ray spectra are used to map out the temperature–compactness (θ–l) plane for AGN coronae. We find that most of the coronae lie clustered near the boundary for runaway pair production, suggesting that annihilation and pair production act to regulate the temperature of the corona. We discuss the implications of coronae whose high-energy cutoff may indicate a low coronal temperature on the heating and thermalization mechanisms in the corona.
Additional Information
© 2018 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2018 April 20; revised 2018 August 23; accepted 2018 August 24; published 2018 October 19. We would like to thank the referee for comments that helped improve the final version of the manuscript. We have made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software and Calibration teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research has made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA). M.B. acknowledges support from NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program (grant NNX14AQ07H) and support from the black hole Initiative at Harvard University, through the grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Facility: NuSTAR. -Attached Files
Published - Kamraj_2018_ApJ_866_124.pdf
Accepted Version - 1809.01757.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 90350
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20181023-091921294
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- NNX14AQ07H
- NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship
- Harvard University
- John Templeton Foundation
- Created
-
2018-10-23Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- NuSTAR, Space Radiation Laboratory, Astronomy Department