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Thermally driven wind as the origin of warm absorbers in AGN

Mizumoto, Misaki; Done, Chris; Tomaru, Ryota; Edwards, Isaac

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Authors

Ryota Tomaru

Isaac Edwards



Abstract

Warm absorbers are present in many Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), seen as mildly ionised gas outflowing with velocities of a few hundred to a few thousand kilometres per second. These slow velocities imply a large launch radius, pointing to the broad line region and/or torus as the origin of this material. Thermal driving was originally suggested as a plausible mechanism for launching this material but recent work has focused instead on magnetic winds, unifying these slow, mildly ionised winds with the more highly ionised ultra-fast outflows. Here we use the recently developed quantitative models for thermal winds in black hole binary systems to predict the column density, velocity and ionisation state from AGN. Thermal winds are sensitive to the spectral energy distribution (SED), so we use realistic models for SEDs which change as a function of mass and mass accretion rate, becoming X-ray weaker (and hence more disc dominated) at higher Eddington ratio. These models allow us to predict the launch radius, velocity, column density and ionisation state of thermal winds as well as the mass loss rate and energetics. While these match well to some of the observed properties of warm absorbers, the data point to the presence of additional wind material, most likely from dust driving.

Citation

Mizumoto, M., Done, C., Tomaru, R., & Edwards, I. (2019). Thermally driven wind as the origin of warm absorbers in AGN. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 489(1), 1152-1160. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz2225

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 7, 2019
Online Publication Date Aug 12, 2019
Publication Date Jan 1, 2019
Deposit Date Aug 13, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 489
Issue 1
Pages 1152-1160
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz2225

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in the Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2019 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.






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