Kavli Affiliate: Claudio Ricci
| First 5 Authors: Alessia Tortosa, Claudio Ricci, Francesco Tombesi, Luis C. Ho, Pu Du
| Summary:
The physical properties of the accretion flow and of the X-ray emitting
plasma, in supermassive black holes accreting at extreme Eddington rates, are
still very unclear. Here we present the analysis of simultaneous XMM-Newton and
NuSTAR observations of the hyper-Eddington Seyfert 1 galaxy IRAS 04416+1215,
carried out in 2020. The main goal of these observations is to investigate the
properties of the X-ray corona, as well as the structure of the accretion flow
and of the circumnuclear environment, in this regime of extreme accretion. IRAS
04416+1215 has one of the highest Eddington ratio ($lambda_{rm Edd}simeq
472$) in the local Universe. It shows an interesting spectral shape, very
similar to the standard Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxy’s spectra, with the
presence of multi-phase absorption structure composed of three phases, whose
estimate of the minimum and maximum distances suggests two different
interpretations, one consistent with the three X-ray winds being co-spatial,
and possibly driven by magnetohydrodynamical processes, the other consistent
with the multi-phase winds being also multi-scale. The X-ray spectrum of IRAS
04416+1215 also has a prominent soft excess component and a hard X-ray emission
dominated by a reflection component. Moreover, our detailed spectral analysis
shows that IRAS 04416+1215 has the lowest coronal temperature measured so far
by NuSTAR ($kT_e=3-22$ keV, depending on the model). This is consistent with a
hybrid coronal plasma, in which the primary continuum emission is driven by
pair production due to high-energy tail of the energy distribution of
non-thermal electrons.
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