IUCAA Preprints

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    On the origin of the featureless soft X-ray excess emission from the Seyfert 1 galaxy ESO 198–G24
    (IUCAA, 2015-02) Laha, Sibasish; Dewangan, Gulab Chand; Kembhavi, A.K.
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    Soft time lags in the X-ray emission of mrk 1040
    (2011-01-30) Tripathi, Shruti; Misra, Ranjeev; Dewangan, Gulab Chand; et al.
    Temporal analysis of X-ray binaries and Active Galactic Nuclei have shown that hard X-rays react to variation of soft ones after a time delay. The opposite trend, or soft lag, has only been seen in a few rare Quasi-periodic Oscillations in X-ray binaries and recently for the AGN, 1H 0707-495, on short timescales of ∼ 103 secs. Here, we report analysis of a XMM-Newton observation of Mrk 1040, which reveals that on the dominant variability timescale of ∼ 104 secs, the source seems to exhibit soft lags. If the lags are frequency independent, they could be due to reverberation effects of a relativistically blurred reflection component responding to a varying continuum. Alternatively, they could be due to Comptonization delays in the case when high energy photons impinge back on the soft photon source. Both models can be verified and their parameters tightly constrained, because they will need to predict the photon spectrum, the r.m.s variability and time lag as a function of energy. A successful application of either model will provide unprecedented information on the radiative process, geometry and more importantly the size of the system, which in turn may provide stringent test of strong general relativistic effects.
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    Associated spectral and temporal state transition of the bright ULX NGC 1313 X-1
    (2010-05-21) Dewangan, Gulab Chand; et al.
    Stellar mass black hole X-ray binaries exhibit X-ray spectral states which also have distinct and characteristic temporal properties. These states are believed to correspond to different accretion disc geometries. We present analysis of two XMM-Newton observations of the Ultra-Luminous X-ray source (ULX) NGC 1313 X-1, which reveal that the system was in two different spectral states. While spectral variations have been observed in this source before, this data provides clear evidence that the spectral states also have distinct temporal properties. With a count rate of ~ 1.5 counts/s and a fractional variability amplitude of ~ 15%, the ULX was in a high flux and strongly variable state in March 2006. In October 2006, the count rate of the ULX had reduced by a factor of ~ 2 and the spectral shape was distinctly different with the presence of a soft component. No strong variability was detected during this low flux state with an upper limit on the amplitude < 3%. Moreover, the spectral properties of the two states implies that the accretion disc geometry was different for them. The low flux state is consistent with a model where a standard accretion disc is truncated at a ra- dius of ~ 17 Schwarzschild radius around a ~ 200M⊙ black hole. The inner hot region Comptonizes photons from the outer disc to give the primary spectral component. The spectrum of the high flux state is not compatible with such a geometry. Instead, it is consistent with a model where a hot corona covers a cold accretion disc and Comptonizes the disc photons. The variability as a function of energy is also shown to be consistent with the corona model. Despite these broad analogies with Galactic black hole systems, the spectral nature of the ULX is distinct in having a lower temperature (~ 2 keV) of the hot Comptonizing plasma and higher optical depth (~ 15) than what is observed for the Galactic ones.