No Arabic abstract
We study the coherence of the near-infrared and X-ray background fluctuations and the X-ray spectral properties of the sources producing it. We use data from multiple Spitzer and Chandra surveys, including the UDS/SXDF surveys, the Hubble Deep Field North, the EGS/AEGIS field, the Chandra Deep Field South and the COSMOS surveys, comprising $sim$2275 Spitzer/IRAC hours and $sim$~16 Ms of Chandra data collected over a total area of $sim$~1~deg$^2$. We report an overall $sim$5$sigma$ detection of a cross-power signal on large angular scales $>$ 20$$ between the 3.6 and 4.5mum and the X-ray bands, with the IR vs [1-2] keV signal detected at 5.2$sigma$. The [0.5-1] and [2-4] keV bands are correlated with the infrared wavelengths at a $sim$1$-$3$sigma$ significance level. The hardest X-ray band ([4-7] keV) alone is not significantly correlated with any infrared wavelengths due to poor photon and sampling statistics. We study the X-ray SED of the cross-power signal. We find that its shape is consistent with a variety of source populations of accreting compact objects, such as local unabsorbed AGNs or high-z absorbed sources. We cannot exclude that the excess fluctuations are produced by more than one population. Because of poor statistics, the current relatively broad photometric bands employed here do not allow distinguishing the exact nature of these compact objects or if a fraction of the fluctuations have instead a local origin.
We present a study of the relation between X-rays and ultraviolet emission in quasars for a sample of broad-line, radio-quiet objects obtained from the cross-match of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR14 with the latest Chandra Source Catalog 2.0 (2,332 quasars) and the Chandra COSMOS Legacy survey (273 quasars). The non-linear relation between the ultraviolet (at 2500 A, $L_{O}$) and the X-ray (at 2 keV, $L_{X}$) emission in quasars has been proved to be characterised by a smaller intrinsic dispersion than the observed one, as long as a homogeneous selection, aimed at preventing the inclusion of contaminants in the sample, is fulfilled. By leveraging on the low background of Chandra, we performed a complete spectral analysis of all the data available for the SDSS-CSC2.0 quasar sample (i.e. 3,430 X-ray observations), with the main goal of reducing the uncertainties on the source properties (e.g. flux, spectral slope). We analysed whether any evolution of the $L_{X}-L_{O}$ relation exists by dividing the sample in narrow redshift intervals across the redshift range spanned by our sample, $z simeq 0.5-4$. We find that the slope of the relation does not evolve with redshift and it is consistent with the literature value of $0.6$ over the explored redshift range, implying that the mechanism underlying the coupling of the accretion disc and hot corona is the same at the different cosmic epochs. We also find that the dispersion decreases when examining the highest redshifts, where only pointed observations are available. These results further confirm that quasars are `standardisable candles, that is we can reliably measure cosmological distances at high redshifts where very few cosmological probes are available.
We investigate the X-ray variability characteristics of hard X-ray selected AGNs (based on Swift/BAT data) in the soft X-ray band using the RXTE/ASM data. The uncertainties involved in the individual dwell measurements of ASM are critically examined and a method is developed to combine a large number of dwells with appropriate error propagation to derive long duration flux measurements (greater than 10 days). We also provide a general prescription to estimate the errors in variability derived from rms values from unequally spaced data. Though the derived variability for individual sources are not of very high significance, we find that, in general, the soft X-ray variability is higher than those in hard X-rays and the variability strengths decrease with energy for the diverse classes of AGN. We also examine the strength of variability as a function of the break time scale in the power density spectrum (derived from the estimated mass and bolometric luminosity of the sources) and find that the data are consistent with the idea of higher variability at time scales longer than the break time scale.
We systematically analyze X-ray variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the 7~Ms textit{Chandra} Deep Field-South survey. On the longest timescale ($approx~17$ years), we find only weak (if any) dependence of X-ray variability amplitudes on energy bands or obscuration. We use four different power spectral density (PSD) models to fit the anti-correlation between normalized excess variance ($sigma^2_{rm nxv}$) and luminosity, and obtain a best-fit power law index $beta=1.16^{+0.05}_{-0.05}$ for the low-frequency part of AGN PSD. We also divide the whole light curves into 4 epochs in order to inspect the dependence of $sigma^2_{rm nxv}$ on these timescales, finding an overall increasing trend. The analysis of these shorter light curves also infers a $beta$ of $sim 1.3$ that is consistent with the above-derived $beta$, which is larger than the frequently-assumed value of $beta=1$. We then investigate the evolution of $sigma^2_{rm nxv}$. No definitive conclusion is reached due to limited source statistics but, if present, the observed trend goes in the direction of decreasing AGN variability at fixed luminosity toward large redshifts. We also search for transient events and find 6 notable candidate events with our considered criteria. Two of them may be a new type of fast transient events, one of which is reported here for the first time. We therefore estimate a rate of fast outbursts $langledot{N}rangle = 1.0^{+1.1}_{-0.7}times 10^{-3}~rm galaxy^{-1}~yr^{-1}$ and a tidal disruption event~(TDE) rate $langledot{N}_{rm TDE}rangle=8.6^{+8.5}_{-4.9}times 10^{-5}~rm galaxy^{-1}~yr^{-1}$ assuming the other four long outbursts to be TDEs.
We present the X-ray spectral analysis of the 1855 extragalactic sources in the Chandra COSMOS-Legacy survey catalog having more than 30 net counts in the 0.5-7 keV band. 38% of the sources are optically classified Type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGN), 60% are Type 2 AGN and 2% are passive, low-redshift galaxies. We study the distribution of AGN photon index and of the intrinsic absorption N(H,z) based on the sources optical classification: Type 1 have a slightly steeper mean photon index than Type 2 AGN, which on the other hand have average intrinsic absorption ~3 times higher than Type 1 AGN. We find that ~15% of Type 1 AGN have N(H,z)>1E22 cm^(-2), i.e., are obscured according to the X-ray spectral fitting; the vast majority of these sources have L(2-10keV)>$1E44 erg/s. The existence of these objects suggests that optical and X-ray obscuration can be caused by different phenomena, the X-ray obscuration being for example caused by dust-free material surrounding the inner part of the nuclei. ~18% of Type 2 AGN have N(H,z)<1E22 cm^(-2), and most of these sources have low X-ray luminosities (L(2-10keV)<$1E43 erg/s). We expect a part of these sources to be low-accretion, unobscured AGN lacking of broad emission lines. Finally, we also find a direct proportional trend between N(H,z) and host galaxy mass and star formation rate, although part of this trend is due to a redshift selection effect.
Since its launch in 1999, the XMM-textit{Newton} mission has compiled the largest catalogue of serendipitous X-ray sources, with the 3XMM being the third version of this catalogue. This is because of the combination of a large effective area (5000 $rm cm^2$ at 1 keV) and a wide field of view (30 arcmin). The 3XMM-DR6 catalogue contains about 470,000 unique X-ray sources over an area of 982 $rm deg^2$. A significant fraction of these (100,178 sources) have reliable optical, near/mid-IR counterparts in the SDSS, PANSTARRS, VIDEO, UKIDSS and WISE surveys. In a previous paper we have presented photometric redshifts for these sources using the TPZ machine learning algorithm. About one fourth of these (22,677) have adequate photon statistics so that a reliable X-ray spectrum can be extracted. Obviously, owing to both the X-ray counts selection and the optical counterpart constraint, the sample above is biased towards the bright sources. Here, we present XMMFITCAT-Z: a spectral fit catalogue for these sources using the Bayesian X-ray Analysis (BXA) technique. As a science demonstration of the potential of the present catalogue, we comment on the optical and mid-IR colours of the 765 X-ray absorbed sources with $N_mathrm{H} > 10^{22},mathrm{cm}^{-2}$. We show that a considerable fraction of X-ray selected AGN would not be classified as AGN following the mid-IR W1-W2 vs. W2 selection criterion. These are AGN with lower luminosities, where the contribution of the host galaxy to the MIR emission is non-negligible. Only one third of obscured AGN in X-rays present red colours or r-W2 > 6. Then it appears that the r-W2 criterion, often used in the literature for the selection of obscured AGN, produces very different X-ray absorbed AGN samples compared to the standard X-ray selection criteria.