X-ray properties of high-redshift Radio Loud and Radio Quiet Quasars observed by Chandra

TL;DR

This study analyzes high-redshift quasars to compare their X-ray properties, revealing that radio-loud quasars have flatter spectra and higher X-ray luminosity than radio-quiet quasars, using Chandra observations.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale comparison of X-ray spectral properties between high-redshift RLQ and RQQ, confirming spectral hardness differences with statistical significance.

Findings

RLQ have higher X-ray luminosity than RQQ.

RLQ exhibit flatter (harder) X-ray spectra than RQQ.

Statistical tests confirm significant spectral differences.

Abstract

We performed a study of high redshift ($z>2$) quasars, looking for the main differences between Radio Loud Quasars (RLQ) and Radio Quiet Quasars (RQQ) in the X-ray band. Our sample of 472 RQQ and 81 RLQ was selected by cross-matching the SDSS DR7 quasars catalog with the Chandra Source Catalog. We computed the X-ray luminosity for the two samples and confirmed the X-ray luminosity excess of RLQ over RQQ. We fit the X-ray spectra assuming the absorbed power law model and obtained the photon index ($\Gamma$) values for all the sources in the sample. We excluded quasars with a low number of counts ($<10$) and large uncertainty on the best-fit photon index ($\Gamma_{err}>1$), and obtained the mean values of $\Gamma_{RLQ}=1.70 \hspace{0.5mm}_{-0.33}^{+0.36}$ and $\Gamma_{RQQ}=2.19 \hspace{0.5mm}_{-0.44}^{+0.46}$ for the RLQ and RQQ samples, respectively, showing that the RLQ have flatter (harder) X-ray spectra than RQQ. The Kuiper-two test confirms this result with the significant difference between the RLQ and RQQ photon index distributions ($D_{k}=0.37$ and P-value $= 10^{-6}$). We also evaluated the hardness ratio distributions and confirmed that the spectra of RLQ are flatter than the spectra of the RQQ. The RLQ's hard-to-soft ratio distribution is skewed towards the hard X-ray band, while the RQQ is towards the soft X-ray band. The hard-to-medium and medium-to-soft ratios show no difference.