Open AccessInferring the coronal flaring patterns in active galactic nuclei from reverberation maps
Author(s) -
Goyder R.,
Lasenby A. N.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.058
H-Index - 383
eISSN - 1365-2966
pISSN - 0035-8711
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2004.08071.x
Subject(s) - physics , reverberation mapping , astrophysics , active galactic nucleus , reverberation , galaxy , degeneracy (biology) , line (geometry) , astronomy , geometry , bioinformatics , mathematics , acoustics , biology
The relativistically broadened iron Kα line at 6.4 keV observed in the Seyfert 1 galaxy MCG–6‐30‐15 has provided a probe of the strong‐gravity environment near a black hole, in particular suggesting that it is rapidly spinning. An important variable in such analyses is the geometry of the illuminating source. We present a new technique that constrains this geometry based on the spectral line shape, based on a model of discrete, point‐like flaring regions in the X‐ray corona. We apply it to simulated reverberation maps and give examples of successful reconstructions of complex coronal flaring patterns. For time‐averaged spectral lines the problem is highly degenerate and so its inversion is more challenging. We quantify this degeneracy and give a measure of the spatial accuracy of the method in this case, before checking that it is consistent with the existing picture of MCG–6‐30‐15 by applying it to recent data from XMM–Newton .