On the Properties of X-Ray Corona in Seyfert 1 Galaxies

Abstract

We carried out a uniform and systematic analysis of a sample of 112 nearby bright Seyfert 1 type active galactic nuclei, the observations of which were carried out by the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array between 2013 August and 2022 May. The main goal of this analysis is to investigate the nature of the X-ray corona in Seyfert 1 galaxies. By fitting a physical model to the NuSTAR spectra, we could constrain the high-energy cutoff (Ecut) for 73 sources in our sample. To estimate the temperature of the corona (kTe) in our sample of 112 sources, we used the Comptonization model to fit their spectra. We could constrain kTe in 42 sources. We found a strong positive correlation between Ecut and kTe, with most of the sources lying above the empirical approximation of Ecut = 2−3 kTe. We investigated for possible correlations between various properties of the corona obtained from physical model fits to the observed spectra and between various coronal parameters and physical properties of the sources such as Eddington ratio and black hole mass. We found (a) a strong correlation between Ecut and the photon index and (b) a significant negative correlation between kTe and the optical depth. From detailed statistical analysis of the correlation of coronal parameters with the Eddington ratio and black hole mass, we found no significant correlation. The correlations observed in this study indicate that an optically thin corona is needed to sustain a hotter corona with a steeper spectrum.