Insight into the origin of multiwavelength emissions of PKS 1510-089 through modeling 12 SEDs from 2008 to 2015

TL;DR

This study models 12 spectral energy distributions of PKS 1510-089 from 2008 to 2015, revealing insights into the jet's origin, emission mechanisms, and the role of accretion disk and external radiation fields.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed SED modeling of PKS 1510-089 over multiple years, highlighting the jet's matter dominance and the accretion disk's variable inner radius.

Findings

High-energy emission dominated by BLR photon scattering

Jet likely powered by Blandford-Znajek mechanism

Emission regions located beyond the BLR within the dusty torus

Abstract

PKS\,1510$-$089 is one of the most peculiar sources among the FSRQs, exhibiting a notable big blue bump (BBB). This provides an unique opportunity to explore the coupling between the activity of the central engine and the relativistic jet, offering further insight into the origin of the multiwavelength emissions. To this end, we collected multiwavelength data spanning four periods from 2008 to 2015 and performed the spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling using a one-zone homogeneous leptonic model. In the model, a multichromatic accretion disk (AD) is used to fit the optical/UV data sets, while the external radiation fields from the broad-line region (BLR) and dusty torus (DT) are properly considered to produce the high-energy $\gamma$-ray emissions. Our best fit to 12 SEDs yields the following results: (i) The innermost stable orbit ($R_{\rm ISO}$) of the AD is not stable but varies between $3\,R_{\rm S}$ and $18\,R_{\rm S}$ during these observations. (ii) The high-energy hump of the SED is well dominated by Compton scattering of the BLR photons, while the X-ray flux may be comprised of multiple radiation components. (iii) The $\gamma$-ray emitting regions are generally matter-dominated, with low magnetization, and are located beyond the BLR but within the DT. At such distance, the multiwavelength emissions are likely to originate from shock accelerations; (iv) For the energization of the relativistic jet, our study supports the Blandford$-$Znajek (BZ) mechanism, instead of the Blandford$-$Payne (BP) mechanism, as the latter fails to power the jet.