Publication: Radiation induced by relativistic electron showers in the X-ray spectrum of Active Galactic Nuclei
Loading...
Full text at PDC
Publication Date
2005-03
Advisors (or tutors)
Editors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
EDP Sciencies
Citations
Exportar
Abstract
The iron Kalpha emitted from accreting black holes is thought to be produced by the reprocessing of hard X-ray radiation illuminating the disk. Mechanisms which could produce this hard X-ray radiation are magnetic reconnection in the disk corona or shocks. Both phenomena produce high energy particles whose contribution is usually ignored. In this work, we analyze how the transfer of mechanical energy from relativistic electrons to the circumnuclear gas ( accretion disk, BLR) contributes to the X-ray continuum and the iron Ka emission. It is shown that for gas columns comparable to the Thomson depth, the iron Ka yield is comparable to that observed provided that the electron energy is above similar to 600 keV and that the total kinetic luminosity of the beam is around log L-KIN = 46.6- 47.7; this luminosity is comparable to that observed in radio-loud AGNs. The photon index of the X-ray continuum ( 8 keV- 20 keV) generated in such an electron shower is 1 less than or equal to Gamma less than or equal to 2. Gamma and the continuum strength are strongly model-dependent; they are dependent on both the relative orientation between the electron beam and the observer and the radius of the electron beam compared with the characteristic radius of the absorbing medium. The relevance of particle energy transport compared to photon energy transport in the AGN environment is outlined.
Description
UCM subjects
Unesco subjects
Keywords
Citation
Anderson, J. M., Ulvestad, J. S., & Ho, L. C. 2004, ApJ, 603, 42 Antonicci, A. 2004, Ph.D. Thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Balbus, S. A., & Hawley, J. F. 1991, ApJ, 376, 214
Ballantyne, D. R., Ross, R. R., & Fabian, A. C. 2002, MNRAS, 336, 867
Ballantyne, D. R., & Fabian, A. C. 2003, ApJ, 592, 1089
Baró, J., Sempau, J., Fernandez-Varea, J. M., & Salvat, F. 1994, Nucl. Instr. Meth. B, 84, 465
Bethe, H. A., & Heitler, W. 1934, Proc. Roy. Soc. London A, 146, 83
Celotti, A., Padovani, P., & Ghisellini, G. 1997, MNRAS, 286, 415
Collin, S., Coupe, S., Dumont, A.-M., Petrucci, P.-O.,& Rozanska, A. 2003, A&A, 400, 437
Czerny, B., Ró˙za´nska, A., Dovciak, M., Karas, V., & Dumont, A.-M. 2004, A&A, 420, 1
Fabian, A. C., Vaughan, S., Nandra, K., et al. 2002, MNRAS, 335, L1
Hawley, S. 2004, Ap&SS, 291
Heitler, W. 1954, The quantum theory of radiation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press)
Heyvearts, J., Priest, E. R., & Rust, D. M. 1977, ApJ, 216, 123
Hombourger, C. 1998, J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys., 31, 3693
Lee, J. C., Iwasawa, K., Houck, J. C., et al. 2002, ApJ, 570, L47
Menard, F., & Duchene, G. 2004, Ap&SS, 291
Petrucci, P. O., Henri, G., Maraschi, L., et al. 2003, A&A, 388, L5
Pounds, K. A., Nandra, K., Stewart, G. C., George, I. M., & Fabian, A. C. 1990, Nature, 344, 132
Pelletier, G., & Pudritz, R. E. 1992, ApJ, 394, 117
Peterson, B. M. 1997, An introduction to active galactic nuclei (Cambridge Univ. Press), 37
Sauter, F. 1931, Ann. Phys., 9, 217
Schlickeiser, R. 2002, Cosmic Ray Astrophysics (Berlin: Springer-Verlag)
Sung-Joon, Ye, Brezovich, I., Pareek, P., & Naqvi, S. A., Phys. Med. Biol., 49, 387
Vaughan, S., Fabian, A. C., & Nandra, K. 2003, MNRAS, 339, 1237
Verner, D. A., & Yakovlev, D. G. 1995, A&AS, 109, 125