Modelling Continuum Reverberation in AGN: A Spectral-Timing Analysis of the UV Variability Through X-ray Reverberation in Fairall 9

TL;DR

This study models continuum reverberation in AGN to understand UV variability, revealing that intrinsic UV emission dominates over reprocessing effects, challenging traditional accretion disc models.

Contribution

It introduces a fully time-dependent spectral-energy-distribution model for AGN accretion discs and applies it to Fairall 9, showing intrinsic UV variability is significant.

Findings

Reprocessing alone cannot explain observed UV variability.

Intrinsic UV emission plays a major role in variability.

Vertical structures like BLR or winds can enhance reprocessing effects.

Abstract

Continuum reverberation mapping of AGN can provide new insight into the nature and geometry of the accretion flow. Some of the X-rays from the central corona irradiating the disc are absorbed, increasing the local disc temperature. This gives an additional re-processed contribution to the spectral energy distribution (SED) which is lagged and smeared relative to the driving X-ray light-curve. We directly calculate this reverberation from the accretion disc, creating fully time dependent SEDs for a given X-ray light-curve. We apply this to recent intensive monitoring data on Fairall 9, and find that it is not possible to produce the observed UV variability by X-ray reprocessing of the observed light-curve from the disc. Instead, we find that the majority of the variability must be intrinsic to the UV emission process, adding to evidence from changing look AGN that this region has a structure which is quite unlike a Shakura-Sunyaev disc. We filter out this long timescale variability and find that reprocessing alone is still insufficient to explain even the fast variability in our assumed geometry of a central source illuminating a flat disc. The amplitude of reprocessing can be increased by any vertical structure such as the BLR and/or an inner disc wind, giving a better match. Fundamentally though the model is missing the major contributor to the variability, intrinsic to the UV/EUV emission rather than arising from reprocessing.