Confirmation of intermediate-mass black holes candidates with X-ray observations [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01075


The origin of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galaxy centers still remains uncertain. There are two possible ways of their formation – from massive ($10^5 – 10^6 M_{\odot}$) and low-mass ($100 M_{\odot}$) BH nuclei. The latter scenario should leave behind a large number of intermediate mass black holes (IMBH, $10^2 – 10^5 M_{\odot}$). The largest published sample of bona-fide IMBH-powered AGN contains 10 objects confirmed in X-ray. Here we present a new sample of 15 bona-fide IMBHs, obtained by confirming the optically selected IMBH candidates by the presence of radiation from the galactic nucleus in the X-ray range, which increases the number of confirmed IMBHs at the centers of galaxies by 2.5 times. In the same way, 99 black holes with masses of $2\cdot10^5 – 10^6 M_{\odot}$ were confirmed. The sources of X-ray data were publicly available catalogs, archives of data, and our own observations on XMM-Newton, Chandra and Swift. The Eddington coefficients for 30% of the objects from both samples turned out to be close to critical, from 0.5 to 1, which is an unusually high fraction. Also for the first time for light-weight SMBH the correlations between the luminosity in the [OIII] emission line or the broad component of the $H\alpha$ line and the luminosity in the X-ray range were plotted.

Read this paper on arXiv…

V. Toptun, I. Chilingarian, K. Grishin, et. al.
Wed, 5 Jan 22
13/54

Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures. Astronomy at the epoch of multimessenger studies. Proceedings of the VAK-2021 conference, Aug 23-28, 2021 – Moscow, 2021