Quasi periodic oscillations in active galactic nuclei

TL;DR

This paper discusses the detection of quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in active galactic nuclei, their energy-dependent characteristics, and their potential analogy to high-frequency QPOs in X-ray binaries, offering insights into accretion processes.

Contribution

It reports new detections of QPOs in specific active galactic nuclei and explores their energy dependence and reverberation features, advancing understanding of accretion physics.

Findings

QPOs detected in RE J1034+396 and MS 22549-3712.

QPOs are energy-dependent, primarily observed in the primary power-law continuum.

Evidence of X-ray reverberation at QPO frequencies.

Abstract

Quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) are coherent peaks of variability power observed in the X-ray power spectra (PSDs) of stellar mass X-ray binaries (XRBs). A scale invariance of the accretion process implies they should be present in the active galactic nuclei. The first robust detection was a $\sim 1$ hr periodicity in the Seyfert galaxy RE J1034+396 from a $\sim 90$ ks XMM-Newton observation, however, subsequent observations failed to detect the QPO in the $0.3-10.0$ keV band. In this talk we present the recent detection of the $\sim 1$ hr periodicity in the $1.0-4.0$ keV band of 4 further low-flux/spectrally-harder observations of RE J1034+396 (see Alston et al 2014). We also present recent work on the discovery of a QPO in the Seyfert galaxy, MS 22549-3712, which again is only detected in energy bands associated with the primary power-law continuum emission (Alston et al 2015). We conclude these features are most likely analogous to the high-frequency QPOs observed in XRBs. In both sources, we also see evidence for X-ray reverberation at the QPO frequency, where soft X-ray bands and Iron K$\alpha$ emission lag the primary X-ray continuum. These time delays may provide another diagnostic for understanding the underlying QPO mechanism observed in accreting black holes.