The Suzaku view of highly-ionised outflows in AGN

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes Suzaku X-ray data of AGN, revealing that about 36% exhibit clear signs of highly-ionised, high-velocity outflows, consistent with previous findings from XMM-Newton.

Contribution

First comprehensive Suzaku-based survey of highly-ionised AGN outflows, confirming their properties and prevalence with robust statistical methods.

Findings

36% of AGN show unambiguous high-velocity ionised outflows

Absorber properties are consistent with previous XMM-Newton studies

Methodology combines energy-intensity contours with Monte Carlo analysis

Abstract

We are conducting a systematic study of highly-ionised outflows in AGN using archival Suzaku data. To date we have analysed 59 observations of 45 AGN using a combined energy-intensity contour plot and Montecarlo method. We find that ~36% (16/45) of sources analysed so far show largely unambigous signatures (i.e., Montecarlo proabilities of >95%) of highly-ionised, high-velocity absorption troughs in their X-ray spectra. From XSTAR fitting we find that, overall, the properties of the absorbers are very similar to those found recently by Tombesi et al. (2010,2011) with XMM-Newton for the same phenomenon.