The response of relativistic outflowing gas to the inner accretion disk of a black hole

Abstract

Active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback is the process by which supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies may moderate the growth of their hosts. Gas outflows from supermassive black holes release huge quantities of energy into the interstellar medium, clearing the surrounding gas. The most extreme of these, the ultra-fast outflows (UFOs), are the subset of X-ray detected outflows with velocities higher than 10,000 km/s, believed to originate in relativistic disc winds, a few hundred gravitational radii from the black hole. The absorption features produced by these outflows are variable, but no clear link has been found between the behaviour of the X-ray continuum and the energy or equivalent width of the outflow features due to the long time-scales of quasar variability. Here, we present the detection of multiple absorption lines from an extreme ultra-fast gas flow in the X-ray spectrum of the active galactic nucleus IRAS 13224-3809, at 0.236+/-0.006 times the speed of light (71,000 km/s), where the absorption is strongly anti-correlated with the emission from the inner regions of the accretion disk. If the gas flow is identified as a genuine outflow then it is in the fastest 5 per cent of such winds, and its variability is hundreds of times faster than in other variable winds, allowing us to observe in hours what would take months in a quasar. We find signatures of the wind simultaneously in both low and high energy detectors, which are consistent with a single ionized outflow, linking the two phenomena. The detection of the wind responding to the emission from the inner disk demonstrates a connection between accretion processes occurring on very different scales, with the X-rays from within a few gravitational radii of the black hole ionizing the relativistically outflowing gas as the flux rises.

13 pages, 7 figures, published in Nature 02/03/17

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Cited by in corpus (30)

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• Super-Eddington QSO RX J0439.6-5311. II. Multi-wavelength Constraints on the Global Structure of the Accretion Flow
• Evidence for an emerging disc wind and collimated outflow during an X-ray flare in the narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk 335
• XMM-Newton Campaign On Ultraluminous X-ray Source NGC 1313 X-1: Wind vs. State Variability
• Using principal component analysis to understand the variability of PDS 456
• A Low-Flux State in IRAS 00521-7054 seen with NuSTAR and XMM-Newton: Relativistic Reflection and an Ultrafast Outflow
• Discovery of an X-ray Quasar Wind Driving the Cold Gas Outflow in the Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy IRAS F05189-2524
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• NuSTAR view of the black hole wind in the galaxy merger IRAS F11119$+$3257
• A Full Characterisation of the Supermassive Black Hole in IRAS 09149-6206
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• Disentangling the Complex Broadband X-ray Spectrum of IRAS 13197-1627 with NuSTAR, XMM-Newton and Suzaku
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• The lively accretion disk in NGC 2992. I. Transient iron K emission lines in the high flux state
• The nuclear architecture of NGC 4151: on the path toward a universal outflow mechanism in light of NGC 1068
• Detection of a variable ultra-fast outflow in the Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxy PG 1448+273
• RADs energetics and constraints on emerging tori collisions around super-massive Kerr Black Holes
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