Multidimensional modelling of X-ray spectra for AGN accretion disc outflows

By S. Sim, K. Long, L. Miller, T. Garching, Stsci, U. Oxford, U. Maryland, NasaGsfc. 2008

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Highly ionized fast accretion disc winds have been suggested as an explanation for a variety of observed absorption and emission features in the X-ray spectra of active galactic nuclei. Simple estimates have suggested that these flows may be massive enough to carry away a significant fraction of the accretion energy and could be involved in creating the link between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. However, testing these hypotheses, and quantifying the outflow signatures, requires high-quality theoretical spectra for comparison with observations. Here, we describe extensions of our Monte Carlo radiative transfer code that allow us to generate realistic theoretical spectra for a much wider variety of disc wind models than that was possible in our previous work. In particular, we have expanded the range of atomic physics simulated by the code so that L- and M-shell ions can now be included. We have also substantially improved our treatment of both ionization and radiative heating such that we are now able to compute spectra for outflows containing far more diverse plasma conditions. We present example calculations that illustrate the variety of spectral features predicted by parametrized outflow models and demonstrate their applicability to the interpretation of data by comparison with observations of the bright quasar PG1211+143. We find that the major features in the observed 2–10 keV spectrum of this object can be well reproduced by our spectra, confirming that it likely hosts a massive outflow.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4832048f86d17541f85cd87cbfcac06240e2e7b1

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. F. Tombesi
2. V. Braito
3. M. Cappi
4. J. Reeves
5. T. Yaqoob
6. Keele University
7. NasaGsfc
8. C. Reynolds

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. J. Reeves
2. M. Cappi
3. F. Tombesi
4. V. Braito
5. NasaGsfc
6. A. King
7. K. Pounds

Citations in the corpus

• DISCOVERY OF ULTRA-FAST OUTFLOWS IN A SAMPLE OF BROAD-LINE RADIO GALAXIES OBSERVED WITH SUZAKU (2010, methodology): “In particular, Sim et al. (2008) and Sim et al. (2010) used their accretion disk wind model to successfully reproduce the 2–10 keV spectra of two bright radio-quiet AGN in which strong blue-shifted Fe K absorption lines were detected in their XMM-Newton spectra, namely Mrk 766 (from Miller et al.…”
• Evidence for ultra-fast outflows in radio-quiet AGNs - I. Detection and statistical incidence of Fe K-shell absorption lines (2010, background): “However, these features are in a region of the spectrum where instrumental resolution and signal-to-noise (S/N) are usually much lower than in the soft X-rays (e.g., Sim et al. 2008; Schurch et al. 2009).”