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Register a new userSearch for wormhole candidates in active galactic nuclei: radiation from colliding accreting flows
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The underlying hypothesis of this work is that the active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are wormhole mouths rather than supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Under some - quite general - assumptions such wormholes may emit gamma radiation as a result of a collision of accreting flows inside the wormholes. This radiation has a distinctive spectrum much different from those of jets or accretion disks of AGNs. An observation of such radiation would serve as evidence of the existence of wormholes.
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The X-ray emission from bright active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is believed to originate in a hot corona lying above a cold, geometrically thin accretion disk. A highly concentrated corona located within $sim10$ gravitational radii above the black hole is inferred from observations. Based on the accretion of interstellar medium/wind, a disk corona model has been proposed in which the corona is well coupled to the disk by radiation, thermal conduction, as well as by mass exchange citep{Liu2015, Qiao2017}. Such a model avoids artificial energy input to the corona and has been used to interpret the spectral features observed in AGN. In this work, it is shown that the bulk emission size of the corona is very small for the extended accretion flow in our model. More than 80% of the hard X-ray power is emitted from a small region confined within 10 Schwarzschild radii around a non-spinning black hole, which is expected to be even smaller accordingly for a spinning black hole. Here, the corona emission is more extended at higher Eddington ratios. The compactness parameter of the corona, $l={Lover R}{sigma_{rm T}over m_{rm e} c^3}$, is shown to be in the range of 1-33 for Eddington ratios of 0.02 - 0.1. Combined with the electron temperature in the corona, this indicates that electron--positron pair production is not dominant in this regime. A positive relation between the compactness parameter and photon index is also predicted. By comparing the above model predictions with observational features, we find that the model is in agreement with observations.
We propose a novel theoretical model to describe a physical identity of the soft X-ray excess, ubiquitously detected in many Seyfert galaxies, by considering a steady-state, axisymmetric plasma accretion within the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) around a black hole (BH) accretion disk. We extend our earlier theoretical investigations on general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) accretion which has implied that the accreting plasma can develop into a standing shock for suitable physical conditions causing the downstream flow to be sufficiently hot due to shock compression. We numerically calculate to examine, for sets of fiducial plasma parameters, a physical nature of fast MHD shocks under strong gravity for different BH spins. We show that thermal seed photons from the standard accretion disk can be effectively Compton up-scattered by the energized sub-relativistic electrons in the hot downstream plasma to produce the soft excess feature in X-rays. As a case study, we construct a three-parameter Comptonization model of inclination angle $theta_{rm obs}$, disk photon temperature $kT_{rm in}$ and downstream electron energy $kT_e$ to calculate the predicted spectra in comparison with a 60 ks {it XMM-Newton}/EPIC-pn spectrum of a typical radio-quiet Seyfert 1 AGN, Ark~120. Our $chi^2$-analyses demonstrate that the model is plausible in successfully describing data for both non-spinning and spinning BHs with the derived range of $61.3~{rm keV} lesssim kT_e lesssim 144.3~{rm keV}$, $21.6~{rm eV} lesssim kT_{rm in} lesssim 34.0~{rm eV}$ and $17.5degr lesssim theta_{rm obs} lesssim 42.6degr$ indicating a compact Comptonizing region of $3-4$ gravitational radii that resembles the putative X-ray coronae.
Accretion disks of active galactic nuclei (AGN) have been proposed as promising sites for producing both (stellar-mass) compact object mergers and extreme mass ratio inspirals. Along with the disk-assisted migration/evolution process, ambient gas materials inevitably accrete onto the compact objects. The description of this process is subject to significant theoretical uncertainties in previous studies. It was commonly assumed that either an Eddington accretion rate or a Bondi accretion rate (or any rate in between) takes place, although these two rates can differ from each other by several orders of magnitude. As a result, the mass and spin evolution of compact objects within AGN disks are essentially unknown. In this work, we construct a relativistic supercritical inflow-outflow model for black hole (BH) accretion. We show that the radiation efficiency of the supercritical accretion of a stellar-mass BH (sBH) is generally too low to explain the proposed electromagnetic counterpart of GW190521. Applying this model to sBHs embedded in AGN disks, we find that, although the gas inflow rates at Bondi radii of these sBHs are in general highly super-Eddington, a large fraction of inflowing gas eventually escapes as outflows so that only a small fraction accretes onto the sBH, resulting in mildly super-Eddington BH absorption in most cases. We also implement this inflow-outflow model to study the evolution of neutron stars (NS) and white dwarfs (WD) in AGN disks, taking into account corrections from star sizes and star magnetic fields. It turns out to be difficult for WDs to grow to the Chandrasekhar limit via accretion because WDs are spun up more efficiently to reach the shedding limit before the Chandrasekhar limit. For NSs the accretion-induced collapse is possible if NS magnetic fields are sufficiently strong, keeping the NS in a slow rotation state during accretion.
Elusive supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are thought to be the penultimate stage of galaxy mergers, preceding a final coalescence phase. SMBHBs are sources of continuous gravitational waves, possibly detectable by pulsar timing arrays; the identification of candidates could help in performing targeted gravitational wave searches. Due to their origin in the innermost parts of active galactic nuclei (AGN), X-rays are a promising tool to unveil the presence of SMBHBs, by means of either double Fe K$alpha$ emission lines or periodicity in their light curve. Here we report on a new method to select SMBHBs by means of the presence of a periodic signal in their Swift-BAT 105-months light curves. Our technique is based on the Fishers exact g-test and takes into account the possible presence of colored noise. Among the 553 AGN selected for our investigation, only the Seyfert 1.5 Mrk 915 emerged as possible candidate for a SMBHB; from the subsequent analysis of its light curve we find a period $P_0=35pm2$ months, and the null hypothesis is rejected at the $3.7sigma$ confidence level. We also present a detailed analysis of the BAT light curve of the only previously X-ray-selected binary candidate source in the literature, the Seyfert 2 galaxy MCG+11-11-032. We find $P_0=26.3pm0.6$ months, consistent with the one inferred from previously reported double Fe K$alpha$ emission lines.
Recent time-resolved spectral studies of a few Active Galactic Nuclei in hard X-rays revealed occultations of the X-ray primary source probably by Broad Line Region (BLR) clouds. An important open question on the structure of the circumnuclear medium of AGN is whether this phenomenon is common, i.e. whether a significant fraction of the X-ray absorption in AGN is due to BLR clouds. Here we present the first attempt to perform this kind of analysis in a homogeneous way, on a statistically representative sample of AGN, consisting of the ~40 brightest sources with long XMM-Newton and/or Suzaku observations. We describe our method, based on a simple analysis of hardness-ratio light curves, and its validation through a complete spectroscopic analysis of a few cases. We find that X-ray eclipses, most probably due to clouds at the distance of the BLR, are common in sources where the expected occultation time is compatible with the observation time, while they are not found in sources with longer estimated occultation times. Overall, our results show that occultations by BLR clouds may be responsible for most of the observed X-ray spectral variability at energies higher than 2 keV, on time scales longer than a few ks.
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