X-ray study of accretion flow in narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies

Abstract

We analyzed 13 narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) observed with XMM-Newton. Their X-ray continua are well parameterized by a combination of a hard power law and thermal emission from a standard Shakura-Sunyaev accretion disk. However, the observed disk temperatures are significantly higher than the prediction from the standard disk, and the temperatures are distributed within an extremely narrow range (0.15–0.22 keV) in spite of the wide range of luminosities (L_X = 10^41–45 erg s⁻¹). Furthermore, we found an anti-correlation between the disk temperature and luminosity of PKS 0558–504. These results strongly indicate the breakdown of the standard accretion picture in NLS1s. We suggest that a slim disk, which is a stable disk solution under a high mass-accretion rate, could be able to explain the observational results, if the photon trapping effect is properly taken into account.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html