1. The X-ray and Mid-Infrared luminosities in Luminous Type 1 Quasars
- Author
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Chen, Chien-Ting J., Hickox, Ryan C., Goulding, Andrew D., Stern, Daniel, Assef, Roberto, Kochanek, Christopher S., Brown, Michael J. I., Harrison, Chris M., Hainline, Kevin N., Alberts, Stacey, Alexander, David M., Brodwin, Mark, Del Moro, Agnese, Forman, William R., Gorjian, Varoujan, Jones, Christine, Murray, Stephen S., Pope, Alexandra, and Rovilos, Emmanouel
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies - Abstract
Several recent studies have reported different intrinsic correlations between the AGN mid-IR luminosity ($L_{MIR}$) and the rest-frame 2-10 keV luminosity ($L_{X}$) for luminous quasars. To understand the origin of the difference in the observed $L_{X}-L_{MIR}$ relations, we study a sample of 3,247 spectroscopically confirmed type 1 AGNs collected from Bo\"{o}tes, XMM-COSMOS, XMM-XXL-North, and the SDSS quasars in the Swift/XRT footprint spanning over four orders of magnitude in luminosity. We carefully examine how different observational constraints impact the observed $L_{X}-L_{MIR}$ relations, including the inclusion of X-ray non-detected objects, possible X-ray absorption in type 1 AGNs, X-ray flux limits, and star formation contamination. We find that the primary factor driving the different $L_{X}-L_{MIR}$ relations reported in the literature is the X-ray flux limits for different studies. When taking these effects into account, we find that the X-ray luminosity and mid-IR luminosity (measured at rest-frame $6\mu m$, or $L_{6\mu m}$) of our sample of type 1 AGNs follow a bilinear relation in the log-log plane: $\log L_X =(0.84\pm0.03)\times\log L_{6\mu m}/10^{45}{\rm erg\;s^{-1}} + (44.60\pm0.01)$ for $L_{6\mu m} < 10^{44.79}{\rm erg\;s^{-1}} $, and $\log L_X = (0.40\pm0.03)\times\log L_{6\mu m}/10^{45}{\rm erg\;s^{-1}} +(44.51\pm0.01)$ for $L_{6\mu m} \geq 10^{44.79}{\rm erg\;s^{-1}} $. This suggests that the luminous type 1 quasars have a shallower $L_{X}-L_{MIR}$ correlation than the approximately linear relations found in local Seyfert galaxies. This result is consistent with previous studies reporting a luminosity-dependent $L_{X}-L_{MIR}$ relation, and implies that assuming a linear $L_{X}-L_{MIR}$ relation to infer the neutral gas column density for X-ray absorption might overestimate the column densities in luminous quasars., Comment: The parameters in Equation 2 of the previous version were derived without including XXL-North, and are inconsistent with the parameters reported in the abstract. An erratum is submitted to ApJ and can be downloaded at https://ctjchen.github.io/lxl6umerratum.pdf
- Published
- 2017
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