Wong, Ka-Wah and Nemmen, Rodrigo S. and Irwin, Jimmy A. and Lin, Dacheng (2017) Hard X-ray Emission from the M87 AGN Detected with NuSTAR. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 849 (1). Art. No. L17. ISSN 2041-8213. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/aa92c2. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20171017-090307513
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Abstract
M87 hosts a 3–6 billion solar mass black hole with a remarkable relativistic jet that has been regularly monitored in radio to TeV bands. However, hard X-ray emission ≳10 keV, which would be expected to primarily come from the jet or the accretion flow, had never been detected from its unresolved X-ray core. We report NuSTAR detection up to 40 keV from the the central regions of M87. Together with simultaneous Chandra observations, we have constrained the dominant hard X-ray emission to be from its unresolved X-ray core, presumably in its quiescent state. The core spectrum is well fitted by a power law with photon index Γ = 2.11^(+0.15)_(-0.11). The measured flux density at 40 keV is consistent with a jet origin, although emission from the advection-dominated accretion flow cannot be completely ruled out. The detected hard X-ray emission is significantly lower than that predicted by synchrotron self-Compton models introduced to explain emission above a GeV.
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Additional Information: | © 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 September 16; revised 2017 October 5; accepted 2017 October 11; published 2017 October 26. We thank the referee for helpful comments. This work was supported by NASA Chandra grant GO7-18085X and NASA NuSTAR grant NNX17GF12P. | ||||||||||||
Group: | NuSTAR | ||||||||||||
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Subject Keywords: | accretion, accretion disks – black hole physics – galaxies: elliptical and lenticular, cD – galaxies: individual (M87) – galaxies: nuclei – X-rays: galaxies | ||||||||||||
Issue or Number: | 1 | ||||||||||||
DOI: | 10.3847/2041-8213/aa92c2 | ||||||||||||
Record Number: | CaltechAUTHORS:20171017-090307513 | ||||||||||||
Persistent URL: | https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20171017-090307513 | ||||||||||||
Official Citation: | Ka-Wah Wong et al 2017 ApJL 849 L17 | ||||||||||||
Usage Policy: | No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided. | ||||||||||||
ID Code: | 82404 | ||||||||||||
Collection: | CaltechAUTHORS | ||||||||||||
Deposited By: | Joy Painter | ||||||||||||
Deposited On: | 17 Oct 2017 18:07 | ||||||||||||
Last Modified: | 15 Nov 2021 19:50 |
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