Spectral and Time Series Analyses of the Seyfert 1 AGN: Zw 229.015

Abstract

We analyse the spectra of the archival XMM-Newton data of the Seyfert 1 AGN Zw 229.015 in the energy range $0.3-10.0$ keV. When fitted with a simple power-law, the spectrum shows signatures of weak soft excess below 1.0 keV. We find that both thermal comptonisation and relativistically blurred reflection models provide the most acceptable spectral fits with plausible physical explanations to the origin of the soft excess than do multicolour disc blackbody and smeared wind absorption models. This motivated us to study the variability properties of the soft and the hard X-ray emissions from the source and the relationship between them to put further constraints on the above models. Our analysis reveals that the variation in the $3.0-10.0$ keV band lags that in the $0.3-1.0$ keV by $600_{-280}^{+290}$ s, while the lag between the $1.0-10.0$ keV and $0.3-1.0$ keV is $980_{-500}^{+500}$ s. This implies that the X-ray emissions are possibly emanating from different regions within the system. From these values, we estimate the X-ray emission region to be within $20R_g$ of the central supermassive black hole (where $R_g=GM/c^2$, $M$ is the mass of black hole, $G$ the Newton gravitational constant and $c$ the speed of light). Furthermore, we use XMM-Newton and Kepler photometric lightcurves of the source to search for possible nonlinear signature in the flux variability. We find evidence that the variability in the system may be dominated by stochasticity rather than deterministic chaos which has implications for the dynamics of the accretion system.

arXiv comment10 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (37)

• The Leiden/Argentine/Bonn (LAB) Survey of Galactic HI: Final data release of the combined LDS and IAR surveys with improved stray-radiation corrections
• The European Photon Imaging Camera on XMM-Newton: The MOS Cameras
• Improved surrogate data for nonlinearity tests
• Are the Variations in Quasar Optical Flux Driven by Thermal Fluctuations?
• Overview of the Kepler Science Processing Pipeline
• Intrinsic disc emission and the Soft X-ray Excess in AGN
• An Explanation for the soft X-ray excess in AGN
• Is the soft excess in AGN real?
• A high velocity ionised outflow and XUV photosphere in the narrow emission line quasar PG1211+143
• The distribution and cosmic evolution of massive black hole spins
• An Alternative Approach To Measuring Reverberation Lags in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Is Quasar Optical Variability a Damped Random Walk?
• Magnetically Driven Jets in the Kerr Metric
• Discovery of a relation between black hole mass and soft X-ray time lags in active galactic nuclei
• Discrimination power of measures for nonlinearity in a time series
• 1H0707-495 in 2011: An X-ray source within a gravitational radius of the event horizon
• Correlated X-ray/Optical Variability in the Quasar MR2251-178
• Negative X-ray reverberation time delays from MCG-6-30-15 and Mrk 766
• Long term optical and X-ray variability of the Seyfert galaxy Markarian 79
• Broad-Line Reverberation in the Kepler-Field Seyfert Galaxy Zw 229-015
• The impact of accretion disk winds on the X-ray spectrum of AGN: Part 2 - XSCORT + Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Discovery of a ~5 day characteristic timescale in the Kepler power spectrum of Zw 229-15
• An investigation of the origin of soft X-ray excess emission from Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies Akn564 and Mrk1044
• PG 1211+143: probing high frequency lags in a high mass AGN
• The impact of accretion disk winds on the X-ray spectrum of AGN: Part 1 - XSCORT
• X-ray Reverberation close to the black hole in RE J1034+396
• Two temperature accretion around rotating black holes: Description of general advective flow paradigm in presence of various cooling processes to explain low to high luminous sources
• The X-ray variability of the Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 galaxy IRAS 13224-3809 from an XMM-Newton observation
• Correlated X-ray/UV/optical variability and the nature of accretion disc in the bare Seyfert 1 galaxy Fairall~9
• X-ray time lags and nonlinear variability in the ultraluminous X-ray sources NGC 5408 X-1 and NGC 6946 X-1
• X-ray/UV variability and the origin of soft X-ray excess emission from II Zw 177
• Discovery of hard X-ray delays in the X-ray emission of the Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk~110: possible evidence for Comptonization
• The XMM-Newton view of the radio loud narrow line Seyfert1 galaxy PMN J0948+0022
• Disk-outflow coupling: Energetics around spinning black holes
• Soft time lags in the X-ray emission of Mrk 1040
• XMM-Newton observations of 4 luminous radio-quiet AGN, and the soft X-ray excess problem
• A search for chaos in the optical light curve of a blazar: W2R 1926+42

Cited by in corpus (10)

• X-ray time lags in AGN: inverse-Compton scattering and spherical corona model
• The nature of the soft-excess and spectral variability in the Seyfert 1 galaxy Zw 229.015
• UV to X-ray Comptonization delay in Mrk 493
• Correlating nonlinear properties with spectral states of RXTE data: Possible observational evidences for four different accretion modes around compact objects
• Effects of the refractive index of the X-ray corona on the emission lines in AGN
• A Search for X-ray/UV Correlation in the Reflection-Dominated Seyfert 1 Galaxy Mrk 1044
• Correlating nonlinear time series and spectral properties of IGR J17091-3624: Is it similar to GRS 1915+105?
• On the Relation between the Inclination Angle of the Accretion Disk and the Broad-line Region in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Modelling the energy dependent X-ray variability of Mrk 335
• XMM-Newton and Swift Observations of the Seyfert 1 AGN NGC 5940