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Register a new userA dynamic black hole corona in an active galaxy through X-ray reverberation mapping
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X-ray reverberation echoes are assumed to be produced in the strongly distorted spacetime around accreting supermassive black holes. This signal allows us to spatially map the geometry of the inner accretion flow - a region which cannot yet be spatially resolved by any telescope - and provides a direct measure of the black hole mass and spin. The reverberation timescale is set by the light travel path between the direct emission from a hot X-ray corona and the reprocessed emission from the inner edge of the accretion disc. However, there is an inherent degeneracy in the reverberation signal between black hole mass, inner disc radius and height of the illuminating corona above the disc. Here, we use a long X-ray observation of the highly-variable active galaxy, IRAS 13224-3809, to track the reverberation signal as the system evolves on timescales of a day. With the inclusion of all the relativistic effects, modelling reveals that the height of the X-ray corona increases with increasing luminosity, providing a dynamic view of the inner accretion region. This simultaneous modelling allows us to break the inherent degeneracies and obtain an independent timing-based estimate for the mass and spin of the black hole. The uncertainty on black hole mass is comparable to the leading optical reverberation method, making X-ray reverberation a powerful technique, particularly for sources with low optical variability.
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The central engines of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are powered by accreting supermassive black holes, and while AGNs are known to play an important role in galaxy evolution, the key physical processes occur on scales that are too small to be resolved spatially (aside from a few exceptional cases). Reverberation mapping is a powerful technique that overcomes this limitation by using echoes of light to determine the geometry and kinematics of the central regions. Variable ionizing radiation from close to the black hole drives correlated variability in surrounding gas/dust, but with a time delay due to the light travel time between the regions, allowing reverberation mapping to effectively replace spatial resolution with time resolution. Reverberation mapping is used to measure black hole masses and to probe the innermost X-ray emitting region, the UV/optical accretion disk, the broad emission line region and the dusty torus. In this article we provide an overview of the technique and its varied applications.
Luminous accreting stellar mass and supermassive black holes produce power-law continuum X-ray emission from a compact central corona. Reverberation time lags occur due to light travel time-delays between changes in the direct coronal emission and corresponding variations in its reflection from the accretion flow. Reverberation is detectable using light curves made in different X-ray energy bands, since the direct and reflected components have different spectral shapes. Larger, lower frequency, lags are also seen and are identified with propagation of fluctuations through the accretion flow and associated corona. We review the evidence for X-ray reverberation in active galactic nuclei and black hole X-ray binaries, showing how it can be best measured and how it may be modelled. The timescales and energy-dependence of the high frequency reverberation lags show that much of the signal is originating from very close to the black hole in some objects, within a few gravitational radii of the event horizon. We consider how these signals can be studied in the future to carry out X-ray reverberation mapping of the regions closest to black holes.
A black hole X-ray binary produces hard X-ray radiation from its corona and disk when the accreting matter heats up. During an outburst, the disk and corona co-evolves with each other. However, such an evolution is still unclear in both its geometry and dynamics. Here we report the unusual decrease of the reflection fraction in MAXI J1820+070, which is the ratio of the coronal intensity illuminating the disk to the coronal intensity reaching the observer, as the corona is observed to contrast during the decay phase. We postulate a jet-like corona model, in which the corona can be understood as a standing shock where the material flowing through. In this dynamical scenario, the decrease of the reflection fraction is a signature of the coronas bulk velocity. Our findings suggest that as the corona is observed to get closer to the black hole, the coronal material might be outflowing faster.
A tight relation between the size of the broad-line region (BLR) and optical luminosity has been established in about 50 active galactic nuclei studied through reverberation mapping of the broad Hbeta emission line. The R_blr-L relation arises from simple photoionization considerations. Using a general relativistic model of an optically thick, geometrically thin accretion disk, we show that the ionizing luminosity jointly depends on black hole mass, accretion rate, and spin. The non-monotonic relation between the ionizing and optical luminosity gives rise to a complicated relation between the BLR size and the optical luminosity. We show that the reverberation lag of Hbeta to the varying continuum depends very sensitively to black hole spin. For retrograde spins, the disk is so cold that there is a deficit of ionizing photons in the BLR, resulting in shrinkage of the hydrogen ionization front with increasing optical luminosity, and hence shortened Hbeta lags. This effect is specially striking for luminous quasars undergoing retrograde accretion, manifesting in strong deviations from the canonical R_blr-L relation. This could lead to a method to estimate black hole spins of quasars and to study their cosmic evolution. At the same time, the small scatter of the observed R_blr-L relation for the current sample of reverberation-mapped active galaxies implies that the majority of these sources have rapidly spinning black holes.
Accreting black holes show characteristic reflection features in their X-ray spectrum, including an iron K$alpha$ line, resulting from hard X-ray continuum photons illuminating the accretion disk. The reverberation lag resulting from the path length difference between direct and reflected emission provides a powerful tool to probe the innermost regions around both stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. Here, we present for the first time a reverberation mapping formalism that enables modeling of energy dependent time lags and variability amplitude for a wide range of variability timescales, taking the complete information of the cross-spectrum into account. We use a pivoting power-law model to account for the spectral variability of the continuum that dominates over the reverberation lags for longer time scale variability. We use an analytic approximation to self-consistently account for the non-linear effects caused by this continuum spectral variability, which have been ignored by all previous reverberation studies. We find that ignoring these non-linear effects can bias measurements of the reverberation lags, particularly at low frequencies. Since our model is analytic, we are able to fit simultaneously for a wide range of Fourier frequencies without prohibitive computational expense. We also introduce a formalism of fitting to real and imaginary parts of our cross-spectrum statistic, which naturally avoids some mistakes/inaccuracies previously common in the literature. We perform proof-of-principle fits to Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer data of Cygnus X-1.
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