Chandra Observations of Excess Fe K$\alpha$ Line Emission in Galaxies with High Star Formation Rates: X-ray Reflection on Galaxy Scales?

Abstract

In active galactic nuclei (AGN), fluorescent Fe K$\alpha$ (iron) line emission is generally interpreted as originating from obscuring material around a supermassive black hole (SMBH) on the scale of a few parsecs (pc). However, recent Chandra studies indicate the existence of iron line emission extending to kpc scales in the host galaxy. The connection between iron line emission and large-scale material can be spatially resolved directly only in nearby galaxies, but could be inferred in more distant AGNs by a connection between line emission and star-forming gas and dust that is more extended than the pc-scale torus. Here we present the results from a stacking analysis and X-ray spectral fitting performed on sources in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) 7 Ms observations. From the deep stacked spectra, we select sources with stellar mass $\log (M_{\ast }/M_{\odot })>10$ at $0.5<z<2$, obtaining 25 sources with high infrared luminosity (${\mathrm{SFR}}_{\mathrm{FIR}}\ge 17M_{\odot }{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$) and 32 sources below this threshold. We find that the equivalent width of the iron line EW(Fe) is a factor of three higher with 3$\sigma$ significance for high infrared luminosity measured from Herschel observations, indicating a connection between iron line emission and star-forming material on galaxy scales. We show that there is no significant dependence in EW(Fe) on $M_{\ast }$ or X-ray luminosity, suggesting the reflection of AGN X-ray emission over large scales in their host galaxies may be widespread.

8 pages, 5 figures, accepted by ApJ

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