BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey -- XII. The relation between coronal properties of Active Galactic Nuclei and the Eddington ratio

Abstract

The bulk of the X-ray emission in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is produced very close to the accreting supermassive black hole (SMBH), in a corona of hot electrons which up scatters optical and ultraviolet photons from the accretion flow. The cutoff energy ($E_{\mathrm{C}}$) of the primary X-ray continuum emission carries important information on the physical characteristics of the X-ray emitting plasma, but little is currently known about its potential relation with the properties of accreting SMBHs. Using the largest broad-band (0.3-150 keV) X-ray spectroscopic study available to date, we investigate how the corona is related to the AGN luminosity, black hole mass and Eddington ratio (${\lambda }_{\mathrm{Edd}}$). Assuming a slab corona the median values of the temperature and optical depth of the Comptonizing plasma are $k{T}_{\mathrm{e}}=105\pm 18$ keV and $\tau =0.25\pm 0.06$, respectively. When we properly account for the large number of $E_{\mathrm{C}}$ lower limits, we find a statistically significant dependence of the cutoff energy on the Eddington ratio. In particular, objects with ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{Edd}}>0.1$ have a significantly lower median cutoff energy ($E_{\mathrm{C}}=160\pm 41$ keV) than those with ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{Edd}}\le 0.1$ ($E_{\mathrm{C}}=370\pm 51$ keV). This is consistent with the idea that radiatively compact coronae are also cooler, because they tend to avoid the region in the temperature-compactness parameter space where runaway pair production would dominate. We show that this behaviour could also straightforwardly explain the suggested positive correlation between the photon index ($\Gamma$) and the Eddington ratio, being able to reproduce the observed slope of the $\Gamma -{\lambda }_{\mathrm{Edd}}$ trend.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in MNRAS

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