Detection of the Fe K lines from the binary AGN in 4C+37.11

TL;DR

This paper reports the first detection of Fe K line emission from a known binary AGN, providing insights into the accretion and merger environment of supermassive black holes.

Contribution

It presents the first observation of Fe K lines from a binary SMBH system, revealing details about the emission regions and merger conditions.

Findings

Detected Fe K line at ~6.62 keV with significant statistical confidence

Identified a second Fe K line at ~7.87 keV in stacked spectra

Suggests emission from accretion disk and collisionally ionized medium

Abstract

We report the discovery of the Fe K line emission at $\sim6.62^{+0.06}_{-0.06}$ keV with a width of $\sim0.19^{+0.05}_{-0.05}$ keV using two epochs of {\it Chandra} archival data from the nucleus of the galaxy 4C+37.11, which is known to host a binary supermassive black hole (BSMBH) system where the SMBHs are separated by $\sim7$ mas or $\sim$ 7pc. Our study reports the first detection of the Fe K line from a known binary AGN, and has an F-statistic value of 20.98 and probability $2.47\times 10^{-12}$. Stacking of two spectra reveals another Fe K line component at $\sim7.87^{+0.19}_{-0.09}$ keV. Different model scenarios indicate that the lines originate from the combined effects of accretion disk emission and circumnuclear collisionally ionized medium. The observed low column density favors the gas-poor merger scenario, where the high temperature of the hot ionized medium may be associated with the shocked gas in the binary merger and not with star formation activity. The estimated total BSMBH mass and disk inclination are $\sim1.5\times10^{10}$ M$_\odot$ and $\gtrsim75^\circ$, indicating that the BSMBH is probably a high inclination system. The spin parameter could not be tightly constrained from the present data sets. Our results draw attention to the fact that detecting the Fe K line emissions from BSMBHs is important for estimating the individual SMBH masses, and the spins of the binary SMBHs, as well as exploring their emission regions.