arXiv subjects

Prantik Nandi

Publications and source records attributed to Prantik Nandi.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Physical Inference from the gamma-ray, X-Ray and Optical Time Variability of a Large Sample of Fermi Blazars

We present cross-correlation studies of gamma-ray (0.1-300 GeV), X-ray (0.2-10 keV) and optical (R-band) variability of a sample of 26 blazars during 2008-2016. The light curves are from Fermi-LAT, Swift-XRT, and the Yale-SMARTS blazar monitoring program. We stack the discrete cross-correlation functions of the blazars such that the features that are consistently present in a large fraction of the sample become more prominent in the final result. We repeat the same analysis for two subgroups, namely, low synchrotron peaked (LSP) and high synchrotron peaked (HSP) blazars. We find that, on average, the variability at multiple bands is correlated, with a time lag consistent with zero in both subgroups. We describe this correlation with a leptonic model of non-thermal emission from blazar jets. By comparing the model results with those from the actual data we find that the inter-band cross-correlations are consistent with an emission region of size nearly 0.1 pc within the broad line region for LSP blazars. We rule out large changes of magnetic field (> 0.5 Gauss) across the emission region or small values of magnetic field (e.g. 0.2 Gauss) for this population. We also find that the observed variability of the HSP blazars can be explained if the emission region is much larger than the distance to the broad line region from the central black hole.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2019

Evidence of Outflow Induced Soft Lags of Galactic Black Holes

The nature of lag variation of Galactic black holes remains enigmatic mostly because of nonlinear and non-local physical mechanisms which contribute to the lag of the photons coming from the region close to the central black holes. One of the widely accepted major sources of the hard lag is the inverse Comptonization mechanism. However, the exact reason or reasons for soft lags is yet to be identified. In this paper, we report a possible correlation between radio intensities of several outbursting Galactic black hole candidates and amounts of soft lag. The correlation suggests that the presence of major outflows or jets also change the disk morphology along the line of sight of the observer which produces soft lags.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2019

Spectral properties of NGC 4151 and the Estimation of black hole mass using TCAF solution

We present X-ray spectral analysis of Seyfert 1.5 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) NGC~4151 using \textit{NuSTAR} observation during 2012. This is the first attempt to fit an AGN data using the physical Two Component Advective flow (TCAF) solution. We disentangle the continuum emission properties of the source in the energy range $3.0$ to $70.0$~keV using the spectrum obtained from TCAF model. This model was used as an additive local model directly in {\fontfamily{qcr}\selectfont XSPEC}. Additionally, we used a power law (PL) component, to take care of possible X-ray contribution from the jet, which is not incorporated in the present version of TCAF. Our primary aim is to obtain the flow properties and the mass of the central supermassive black hole from the available archival data. Our best estimate of the average mass obtained from spectral fits of three observations, is $M_{BH}=3.03^{+0.26}_{-0.26}\times 10^7 M_\odot$. This is consistent with earlier estimations in the literature such as reverberation mapping, gas kinematics and stellar dynamics around black holes. We also discuss the accretion dynamics and the flow geometry on the basis of model fitted physical parameters. Model fitted disk accretion rate is found to be lower than the low angular momentum halo accretion rate, indicating that the source was in a hard state during the observation.

astro-ph.HE↗