Thermal Comptonization in a changing corona in the changing-look active galaxy NGC 1566

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spectral variability of the changing-look AGN NGC 1566, revealing how the corona's properties evolve with accretion rate changes during a declining phase, linking it to black hole X-ray binary states.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed broadband spectral analysis of NGC 1566's corona evolution during a changing-look event, highlighting structural changes linked to accretion rate variations.

Findings

Coronal electron temperature increased from ~22 to ~200 keV as seed photons decreased.

Optical depth of the corona decreased from ~4 to ~0.7 during the decline.

X-ray spectral components showed significant variability correlated with flux changes.

Abstract

We present broadband UV/X-ray spectral variability of the changing-look active galactic nucleus NGC 1566 based on simultaneous near-ultraviolet (NUV) and X-ray observations performed by XMM-Newton, Swift, and NuSTAR satellites at five different epochs during the declining phase of the 2018 outburst. We found that the accretion disk, soft X-ray excess, and the X-ray power-law components were extremely variable. Additionally, the X-ray power-law flux was correlated with both the soft excess plus disk and the pure disk fluxes. Our finding shows that at high flux levels the soft X-ray excess and the disk emission both provided the seed photons for thermal Comptonization in the hot corona, whereas at low flux levels where the soft excess was absent, the pure disk emission alone provided the seed photons. The X-ray power-law photon-index was only weakly variable ($\Delta{\Gamma_{hot}}\leq0.06$) and it was not well correlated with the X-ray flux over the declining timescale. On the other hand, we found that the electron temperature of the corona increased from $\sim22$ to $\sim200$ keV with decreasing number of seed photons from June 2018 to August 2019. At the same time, the optical depth of the corona decreased from $\tau_{hot}\sim4$ to $\sim0.7$, and the scattering fraction increased from $\sim1\%$ to $\sim10\%$. These changes suggest structural changes in the hot corona such that it grew in size and became hotter with decreasing accretion rate during the declining phase. The AGN is most likely evolving with decreasing accretion rate towards a state similar to the low/hard state of black hole X-ray binaries.