X-ray/UVOIR Frequency-resolved Time Lag Analysis of Mrk 335 Reveals Accretion Disk Reprocessing

TL;DR

This study uses frequency-resolved time lag analysis to investigate the accretion disk and surrounding regions in Mrk 335, revealing complex variability components and constraining the size of reprocessing regions beyond the disk.

Contribution

First application of Fourier frequency-resolved lag analysis to Mrk 335, comparing it with ICCF methods, and identifying a separate long-timescale variability component.

Findings

Reverberation lags are recovered on short timescales.

A separate variability component suggests a region beyond the accretion disk.

Tentative evidence for a soft X-ray lag related to corona and distant gas.

Abstract

UV and optical continuum reverberation mapping is powerful for probing the accretion disk and inner broad-line region. However, recent reverberation mapping campaigns in the X-ray, UV, and optical have found lags consistently longer than those expected from the standard disk reprocessing picture. The largest discrepancy to-date was recently reported in Mrk 335, where UV/optical lags are up to 12 times longer than expected. Here, we perform a frequency-resolved time lag analysis of Mrk 335, using Gaussian processes to account for irregular sampling. For the first time, we compare the Fourier frequency-resolved lags directly to those computed using the popular Interpolated Cross-Correlation Function (ICCF) method applied to both the original and detrended light curves. We show that the anticipated disk reverberation lags are recovered by the Fourier lags when zeroing in on the short-timescale variability. This suggests that a separate variability component is present on long timescales. If this separate component is modeled as reverberation from another region beyond the accretion disk, we constrain a size-scale of roughly 15 light-days from the central black hole. This is consistent with the size of the broad line region inferred from H$\beta$ reverberation lags. We also find tentative evidence for a soft X-ray lag, which we propose may be due to light travel time delays between the hard X-ray corona and distant photoionized gas that dominates the soft X-ray spectrum below 2 keV.