Search for coronal temperature variation in Seyfert galaxies

Abstract

While the temperature of the X-ray corona ($\rm {kT_e}$) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) are known for many sources, its variation if any is limited to a handful of objects. This is in part due to the requirement of good signal-to-noise X-ray spectra covering a wide range of energies. We present here results on the X-ray spectral analysis of 18 Seyferts, having more than one epoch of observations to look for variation in $\rm {kT_e}$. The data for a total of 52 epochs on these 18 AGN were taken from observations carried out by NuSTAR in the 3−79 keV energy band. From phenomenological and physical model fits to the multi epoch data on these 18 sources from NuSTAR, we could constrain the cut-off energy (Ecut) in a large fraction of the sources. Also, from Comptonized model fits we could obtain $\rm {kT_e}$ for our sample. Of the 18 sources, at the 90% confidence level, evidence for variation in $\rm {kT_e}$ was found for only one source namely MCG+08-11-011. For this source between two epochs, separated by about five years, we found $\rm {kT_e}$ to decrease from 57$^{+29}_{-16}$ keV to 30$^{+11}_{-7}$ keV. During the same period, the flux decreased from (12.60 to 14.02) × 10−11 erg cm−2 s−1 and the optical depth increased from 1.68 to 2.73. We thus found a positive correlation between flux and coronal temperature with a reduction of about 40% in optical depth. Our observations tend to favour the vertically outflowing corona scenario for the observed variation in $\rm {kT_e}$ in MCG+08-11-011.