Hard X-ray properties of NuSTAR blazars

TL;DR

This study analyzes NuSTAR blazar observations to understand their hard X-ray emission, spectral variability, and emission region properties, revealing correlations between flux and spectral hardness across different blazar subclasses.

Contribution

It provides detailed spectral and timing analysis of 13 blazars, linking variability to emission mechanisms and constraining physical parameters like magnetic field and electron energies.

Findings

Hard X-ray spectra are well modeled by log-parabola.

Spectral slopes align with the blazar sequence.

Flux states correlate with spectral hardness.

Abstract

Context. Investigation of the hard X-ray emission properties of blazars is key to the understanding of the central engine of the sources and associated jet process. In particular, simultaneous spectral and timing analyses of the intra-day hard X-ray observations provide us a means to peer into the compact innermost blazar regions, not accessible to our current instruments. Aims. The primary objective of the work is to associate the observed hard X-ray variability properties in the blazars to their flux and spectral states, thereby, based on the correlation among them, extract the details about the emission regions and the processes occurring near the central engine. Methods. We carried out timing, spectral and cross-correlation analysis of 31 NuSTAR observations of 13 blazars. We investigated the spectral shapes of the sources using single power-law, broken power-law and log-parabola models. We also studies the co-relation between the soft and the hard emission using z-transformed discrete correlation function. Results. We found that for most of the sources the hard X-ray emission can be well represented by log-parabola model; and that the spectral slopes for different blazar sub-classes are consistent with so called blazar sequence. We noted a close connection between the flux and spectral slope within the source sub-class in the sense that high flux and/or flux states tend to be harder in spectra. In BL Lacertae objects, assuming particle acceleration by diffusive shocks and synchrotron cooling as the dominant processes governing the observed flux variability, we constrain the magnetic field of the emission region to be a few gauss; whereas in flat-spectrum radio quasars, using external Compton models, we estimate the energy of the lower end of the injected electrons to be a few Lorentz factors.