The Suzaku View of the Disk-Jet Connection in the Low Excitation Radio Galaxy NGC 6251

Abstract

We present results from an 87-ks Suzaku observation of the canonical low-excitation radio galaxy (LERG) NGC 6251. We have previously suggested that LERGs violate conventional AGN unification schemes: they may lack an obscuring torus and are likely to accrete in a radiatively inefficient manner, with almost all of the energy released by the accretion process being channeled into powerful jets. We model the 0.5-20 keV Suzaku spectrum with a single power law of photon index $\Gamma =1.82_{-0.05}^{+0.04}$, together with two collisionally ionized plasma models whose parameters are consistent with the known galaxy- and group-scale thermal emission. Our observations confirm that there are no signatures of obscured, accretion-related X-ray emission in NGC 6251, and we show that the luminosity of any such component must be substantially sub-Eddington in nature.

5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (4)

• Hot and cold gas accretion and feedback in radio-loud active galaxies
• Spitzer Reveals Hidden Quasar Nuclei in Some Powerful FR II Radio Galaxies
• Implications for the structure of the relativistic jet from multiwavelength observations of NGC 6251
• Long-Term X-Ray monitoring of NGC6251: Evidence for a jet-dominated radio galaxy

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