NuStar View of the Central Region of the Perseus Cluster
[4];
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)
- SLAC and Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA (United States)
- Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
- Univ. of Cambridge, Cambridge (United Kingdom)
- Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Daejeon (Republic of Korea)
Located at the center of the Perseus cluster, 3C 84 is an extremely bright and nearby radio galaxy. Because of the strong diffuse thermal emission from the cluster in X-rays, the detailed properties and the origin of a power-law component from the central active galactic nucleus (AGN) remains unclear in the source. We report here the first NuSTAR observations of 3C 84. The source was observed for 24.2 and 32 ks on February 01 and 04, 2018, respectively. NuSTAR observations spectrally decompose the power-law AGN component above 10 keV. The power-law component dominates the spectrum above 20 keV with a photon index $$\sim$$1.9 and an energy flux F$$_{20-30 keV}$$ = 1.0 $$\times$$10$$^{-11}$$ erg cm$$^{-2}$$ s$$^{-1}$$, corresponding to an isotropic luminosity, $$L_{20-30 keV}$$ = 7.4$$\times$$10$$^{42}$$ erg s$$^{-1}$$. We discuss possible emitting sites for the power-law component. The expected thermal emission from the accretion disk is not hot enough to account for the hard X-rays detected from the source. Furthermore, wimilar X-ray and $$γ$$-ray photon indices and long-term flux variations, the absence of cutoff energy in the hard X-ray spectrum of the source, correlated hard X-ray flux and hardness ratio variations, and the similarity of optical-X-ray slope to blazar rather than Seyfert galaxies supports the hard X-ray power-law component originating from the jet.
- Research Organization:
- SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-76SF00515
- OSTI ID:
- 1481170
- Journal Information:
- The Astrophysical Journal. Letters (Online), Vol. 866, Issue 1; ISSN 2041-8213
- Publisher:
- Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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