Fe XXV and Fe XXVI Diagnostics of the Black Hole and Accretion Disk in AGN

Details Fe XXV and Fe XXVI Diagnostics of the Black Hole and Accretion Disk in AGN Fe XXV and Fe XXVI Diagnostics of the Black Hole and Accretion Disk in AGN

Mar 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003head....7.2105y&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #7, #21.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, p.636

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We report the detection of Fe xxv and Fe xxvi Kα emission lines from a Chandra HETGS observation of the narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 7314. The lines are redshifted (cz ˜ 1500 \ km \ s-1) and unresolved. The most viable geometry for the origin of the lines is a disk. The redshift and width constraints on Fe xxvi Lyα alone imply that the disk is within 7o of face-on, and that the line emission comes from within ˜ 600 gravitational radii of the putative central black hole. These limits are model-independent: they not depend on the radial line emissivity, nor on how the continuum is modeled. The only requirement is that the Fe xxvi Lyα line indeed originates in a flat, Keplerian disk. The line emission may extend all the way down to a few gravitational radii and yet still give an overall line profile which is unresolved by Chandra if the disk is illuminated approximately uniformly (this is true also for the more common 6.4 keV Kα lines). The ionization balance of Fe responds to rapid continuum variations on timescales less than 12.5 ks -- unresolved emission from ionization states lower than Fe xxv appears when the continuum level is high. We also detect a constant, unresolved Fe Kα line (EW ˜ 80 eV) with a center energy consistent with the Kα line from Fe i to Fe xvii which is not redshifted, originating at >2.1 light days from the X-ray source. We present the results of a study of Fe Kα lines in a Chandra HETGS sample of type I AGN, including a search for Fe xxv and Fe xxvi Kα lines. These lines provide a more promising tool for measuring black-hole mass and spin than the low ionization-state fluorescent Fe Kα lines since the ambiguity of ionization state is removed and there is no confusion with a non-disk line.

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