Imaging Quasar Coronae Using Gravitational Microlensing

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

Gravitational microlensing provides a unique probe to study the innermost part of quasar accretion disks close to the event horizon of supermassive black holes. We report our long-term monitoring data using Chandra for five gravitationally lensed quasars: Q2237+0305, QJ0158-4325, SDSS0924+0219, SDSS1004+4112 and HE0435-1223. We discover for the first time chromatic microlensing differences between the soft and hard X-ray bands in the X-ray continuum emission. Our results indicate that the coronae above the accretion disk thought to generate X-rays have a non-uniform electron distribution, and the hard X-ray emission may track the event horizon of black holes. We detect metal emission lines for all X-ray images in all lenses. This enables us to compare the microlensing variability between the X-ray continuum and metal emission lines and constrain the metal line emission regions relative to the X-ray continuum. Our results also confirm earlier microlensing results that quasar X-ray emission regions are significantly smaller than the optical emission regions.

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