Mass of the active galactic nucleus black hole XMMUJ134736.6+173403

Abstract

A recent study of the X-ray source XMMUJ134736.6+173403 has revealed a strong quasi-periodic modulation of the X-ray flux. The observation of two quasiperiodic oscillations (QPOs) that occur on a daily timescale and exhibit a 3:1 frequency ratio strongly supports the evidence for the presence of an active galactic nucleus black hole (AGN BH). Assuming an orbital origin of QPOs, we calculated the upper and lower limit on AGN BH mass M and found M ≈ 10 7 − 10 9 M ⊙ . When we compare this to mass estimates of other sources, XMMUJ134736.6+173403 appears to be the most massive source with commensurable QPO frequencies, and its mass represents the current observational upper limit on AGN BH mass based on QPO observations. We note that it will be crucial for the falsification of particular resonance models of QPOs whether only a single QPO with a frequency that completes the harmonic sequence 3 : 2 : 1 is found in this source, or if a new different pair of QPOs with frequencies in the 3 : 2 ratio is found. The former case would agree with the prediction of the 3 : 2 epicyclic resonance model and BH mass M ≈ (5a 2 + 8a + 8) × 10 7 M ⊙ , where a is a dimensionless BH spin.

Possible ∼0.4 h X-ray quasi-periodicity from an ultrasoft active galactic nucleus

“…The resulting spectral indices plotted against the BH masses are shown in Figure 2 (left, red points). As a comparison, we overplot the AGN sample of González-Martín & Vaughan (2012) in which a uniform search for QPOs was performed but yielded no detections. There appears to be a dependence of the detectability of QPOs on BH masses.…”

“…RE J1034+36 is the first AGN for which a significant QPO has been detected (Gierliński et al 2008b). However, a systematic study of power spectra of 104 AGNs by González-Martín & Vaughan (2012) resulted in no conclusive detections of QPOs, except for RE J1034+36. Possible detections of QPOs ( f QPO ∼ [0.7 − 2.7] × 10 −4 Hz) were reported in a few other AGNs from dedicated searches, including 2XMM J123103.2+110648 (J1231, Lin et al 2013), MS2254.9-3712 (Alston et al 2015), 1H 0707-495 (Pan et al 2016;Zhang et al 2018), Mrk 766 (Zhang et al 2017), and MCG -6-30-15 (Gupta et al 2018).…”

“…As the fastest coherent features in the X-ray emission, these HFQPOs are expected to originate from the innermost regions of the accretion flows (e.g., Lai & Tsang 2009). In addition, the frequencies of HFQPOs appear stable and do not vary significantly with the X-ray luminosity, suggesting that this might be a basic property that could potentially provide a probe into the BH mass and spin (Abramowicz & Kluźniak 2001;Abramowicz & Liu 2012;Motta et al 2014;Šrámková et al 2015;Goluchová et al 2019).…”

Influence of Cosmic Repulsion and Magnetic Fields on Accretion Disks Rotating around Kerr Black Holes

“…In some sources, other frequency ratios are observed [102]-for example, in the active galactic nucleus XMMUJ134736.6+173403 at the Seyfert 2 galaxy SDSS J134736.39+173404.6, the frequency ratio 3:1 is exhibited [103] that could be also explained by the geodesic models of HF QPOs [110].…”

Time-scale of twin-peak quasi-periodic oscillations and mass of accreting neutron stars

“…At present there is a growing evidence for such a large range BH QPO frequencies scaling (Zhou et al 2015). This is illustrated in Figure 1 Goluchová et al (2019) and Gupta et al (2019).…”