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Wiley, Astronomical Notes, 10(327), p. 1032-1038, 2006

DOI: 10.1002/asna.200610687

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Statistics of relativistically broadened Fe Kα lines in AGN

Journal article published in 2006 by M. Guainazzi, S. Bianchi ORCID, M. Dovčiak
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

We present preliminary results on the properties of relativistically broadened Fe Kα lines in a collection of more then 100 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) observed by the XMM-Newton EPIC-pn camera. Our main conclusions can be summarized as follows: a) we detect broad lines in about 25% of the sample objects. This fraction increases to 42 ± 13% if we consider only objects with more than 104 counts in the hard (2–10 keV) band, and to 50 ± 32% for the small sub-sample (6 objects) of type 1 Piccinotti AGN with optimal XMM-Newton exposure (at least 2 × 105 counts in the hard band); b) we find no significant difference in the detection rate of broad lines between obscured and unobscured AGN; c) the strongest relativistic profiles are measured in low-luminosity (LX < 1043 erg s–1) AGN; d) Equivalent Widths (EWs) associated with relativistic profiles in stacked spectra are ≲150 eV for all luminosity classes; e) models of relativistically broadened iron line profiles (kyrline, Dovčiak et al. 2005), which include full relativistic treatment of the accretion disk emission around a Kerr black hole in the strong gravity regime, yield an average disk inclination angle ≃30°, and a radial dependence of the disk emissivity profile ≃–3. The distribution of EW is very broad, with 〈log (EW)〉 = 2.4 and σlog (EW) = 1.4. We estimate that an investment of about 1 Ms of XMM-Newton time would be required to put these results on a sound statistical basis. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)