Thermal instability in X-ray photoionized media in Active Galactic Nuclei: II. Role of the thermal conduction in warm absorber

Abstract

A photoionized gas under constant pressure can display a thermal instability, with three or more solutions for possible thermal equilibrium. A unique solution of the structure of the irradiated medium is obtained only if electron conduction is considered. The subject of our study is to estimate how the effect of thermal conduction affects the structure and transmitted spectrum of the warm absorber computed by solving radiative transfer with the code TITAN. We developed a new computational mode for the code TITAN to obtain several solutions for a given external conditions and we test a posteriori which solution is the closest one to the required integral condition based on conduction. We demonstrate that the automatic mode of the code TITAN provides the solution to the radiative transfer which is generally consistent with the estimated exact solution within a few per cent accuracy, with larger errors for some line intensities (up to 20 per cent) for iron lines at intermediate ionization state.

Astronomy and Astrophysics (in press)

References in corpus (9)

• Simultaneous X-ray and UV spectroscopy of the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 5548.II. Physical conditions in the X-ray absorber
• Dynamical and Spectral Modeling of the Ionized Gas and Nuclear Environment in NGC 3783
• Thermal Instability in Clusters of Galaxies with Conduction
• Structure and Stability of Phase Transition Layers in the Interstellar Medium
• Evolution of the X-ray spectrum in the flare model of Active Galactic Nuclei
• A new model for the Warm Absorber in NGC 3783: a single medium in total pressure equilibrium
• A new type of photoionized code required for the new era of X-ray spectroscopy
• Thermal instability in X-ray photoionized media in Active Galactic Nuclei: Influence on the gas structure and spectral features
• Response of the warm absorber cloud to a variable nuclear flux in active galactic nuclei

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Subparsec-scale dynamics of a dusty gas disk exposed to anisotropic AGN radiation with frequency-dependent radiative transfer
• Absorption Measure Distribution in Mrk 509
• The thermal instability of the warm absorber in NGC 3783
• What shapes the Absorption Measure Distribution in AGN outflows
• Quasar main sequence in the UV plane