THE SPIN OF THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE IN NGC 3783

By L. Brenneman, C. Reynolds, Michael A. Nowak, R. Reis, M. Trippe, A. C. Fabian, K. Iwasawa, Julia C. Lee, Jonathan M. Miller, R. Mushotzky and 2 more. 2011

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The Suzaku AGN Spin Survey is designed to determine the supermassive black hole spin in six nearby active galactic nuclei (AGNs) via deep Suzaku stares, thereby giving us our first glimpse of the local black hole spin distribution. Here, we present an analysis of the first target to be studied under the auspices of this Key Project, the Seyfert galaxy NGC 3783. Despite complexity in the spectrum arising from a multi-component warm absorber, we detect and study relativistic reflection from the inner accretion disk. Assuming that the X-ray reflection is from the surface of a flat disk around a Kerr black hole, and that no X-ray reflection occurs within the general relativistic radius of marginal stability, we determine a lower limit on the black hole spin of a ⩾ 0.88 (99% confidence). We examine the robustness of this result to the assumption of the analysis and present a brief discussion of spin-related selection biases that might affect flux-limited samples of AGNs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e2f3fce18901685293da26845b7eb62d42179bf

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Citations in the corpus

The evolution of massive black holes and their spins in their galactic hosts (2012, background): “…black holes and their spins in theirgalactic hosts 23 with the iron Kα measurements of the MBH spins in MCG6-30-15 and in NGC3783, which were claimed to be respectively abh > 0.987 (Brenneman & Reynolds 2006) andabh > 0.9 (Reynolds et al. 2011; Brenneman et al. 2011) at 90% confidence level.”
Irradiation of an accretion disc by a jet: general properties and implications for spin measurements of black holes (2013, background): “…disc emissivities that are much steeper in the inner parts of the accretion disc (see, e.g., Wilms et al. 2001; Miller et al. 2002; Fabianet al. 2002; Fabian et al. 2004, 2012a; Brenneman & Reynolds 2006; Ponti et al. 2010; Brenneman et al. 2011; Gallo et al. 2011; c© 2012 RAS Dauser et al. 2012).”
The Suzaku View of Highly Ionized Outflows in AGN. 1; Statistical Detection and Global Absorber Properties (2012, background): “…either the transmitted or reflected flux along the sight line through smeared absorption (e.g. Chevallier et al. 2006; Done & Nayakshin 2007; Sobolewska & Done 2007) or blurred reflection (e.g. Crummy et al. 2006; Brenneman et al. 2011; Nardini et al. 2011; Nardini, Fabian & Walton 2012) effects.”
Physical Properties of 15 Quasars at z ≳ 6.5 (2017, background): “The spin is still an elusive parameter; it has been observationally measured only in ∼20 sources in the local Universe (through the relativistic broadening of the Fe Kα line; Brenneman et al. 2011 and Reynolds 2014).”
Measuring Black Hole Spin Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy (2013, background): “11 ∗Note that Patrick et al. (2012) find a spin of a < −0.35, clearly discrepant with the results of Brenneman et al. (2011) report here.”
Constraining the mass of dark photons and axion-like particles through black-hole superradiance (2018, background): “Black markers (with error bars) are mass and spin measurements of supermassive BHs obtained through the Kα iron line or by continuum fitting [40, 79].”
IMPROVED REFLECTION MODELS OF BLACK HOLE ACCRETION DISKS: TREATING THE ANGULAR DISTRIBUTION OF X-RAYS (2013, background): “…(Wilms et al. 2001; Fabian et al. 2002; Brenneman & Reynolds 2006; Dauser et al. 2012; Fabian et al. 2012b; Gallo et al. 2011; Ponti et al. 2010; Brenneman et al. 2011, 2013; Duro et al. 2011; Miller et al. 2006; Reis et al. 2008) have revealed a steeper emissivity at the inner parts of the…”
The role of the reflection fraction in constraining black hole spin (2014, methodology): “2010; Brenneman et al. 2011; Gallo et al. 2011; Dauser et al. 2012; Risaliti et al. 2013).”
Superradiance (2015, methodology): “For reference we also show with brackets the constraints that can be placed by current spin measurements of massive/stellar-mass BHs [623, 103] as discussed in Sec.”
Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, background): “The experimental points (with error bars) refer to the supermassive BHs listed [481].”
New Spectral Model for Constraining Torus Covering Factors from Broadband X-Ray Spectra of Active Galactic Nuclei (2018, background): “These parameters will also make it possible to include torus reprocessing components in spectral models of AGN in which these parameters appear to have extreme values (e.g., Brenneman et al. 2011, Kara et al. 2015, Xu et al. 2017).”
Suzaku observations of 'bare' active galactic nuclei (2012, background): “Brenneman et al. (2011) suggest there may actually be an observational bias towards AGN with high spin, based on the widely held expectation that the radiative efficiency of accretion on to a black hole increases with black hole spin, which should result in AGN with high spin being brighter on…”
THE NUCLEAR SPECTROSCOPIC TELESCOPE ARRAY (NuSTAR) HIGH-ENERGY X-RAY MISSION (2013, background): “ASCA’s discovery of a prominent red tail in the iron line profile of the Seyfert 1 galaxy MCG-6-30-15 (Tanaka et al 1995) - later confirmed in this and other objects (e.g., Nandra et al. 2007; de la Calle Perez et al. 2010; Brenneman et al. 2011) - seem to validate this model.”