X-ray Eclipses of Active Galactic Nuclei

X-ray variation is a ubiquitous feature of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), however, its origin is not well understood. In this paper, we show that the X-ray flux variations in some AGNs, and correspondingly the power spectral densities (PSDs) of the variations, may be interpreted as being caused by absorptions of eclipsing clouds or clumps in the broad line region (BLR) and the dusty torus. By performing Monte-Carlo simulations for a number of plausible cloud models, we systematically investigate the statistics of the X-ray variations resulting from the cloud eclipsing and the PSDs of the variations. For these models, we show that the number of eclipsing events can be significant and the absorption column densities due to those eclipsing clouds can be in the range from 10^{21} to 10^{24} cm^{-2}, leading to significant X-ray variations. We find that the PSDs obtained from the mock observations for the X-ray flux and the absorption column density resulting from these models can be described by a broken double power law, similar to those directly measured from observations of some AGNs. The shape of the PSDs depend strongly on the kinematic structures and the intrinsic properties of the clouds in AGNs. We demonstrate that the X-ray eclipsing model can naturally lead to a strong correlation between the break frequencies (and correspondingly the break timescales) of the PSDs and the masses of the massive black holes (MBHs) in the model AGNs, which can be well consistent with the one obtained from observations. Future studies of the PSDs of the AGN X-ray (and possibly also the optical-UV) flux and column density variations may provide a powerful tool to constrain the structure of the BLR and the torus and to estimate the MBH masses in AGNs.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure

Offsets between the X-ray and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich-effect peaks in merging galaxy clusters and their cosmological implications

Observations reveal that the peaks of the X-ray map and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect map of some galaxy clusters are offset from each other. In this paper, we perform a set of hydrodynamical simulations of mergers of two galaxy clusters to investigate the spatial offset between the maxima of the X-ray and the SZ surface brightness of the merging clusters. We find that significantly large SZ-X-ray offsets (>100kpc) can be produced during the major mergers of galaxy clusters. The significantly large offsets are mainly caused by a `jump effect' occurred between the primary and secondary pericentric passages of the two merging clusters, during which the X-ray peak may jump to the densest gas region located near the center of the small cluster, but the SZ peak remains near the center of the large one. Our simulations show that merging systems with higher masses and larger initial relative velocities may result in larger offset sizes and longer offset time durations; and only nearly head-on mergers are likely to produce significantly large offsets. We further investigate the statistical distribution of the SZ-X-ray offset sizes and find that (1) the number distribution of the offset sizes is bimodal with one peak located at low offsets ~0 and the other at large offsets ~350-450kpc/h, but the objects with intermediate offsets are scarce; and (2) the probabilities of the clusters in the mass range higher than 2x10^{14}Msun/h that have offsets larger than 20, 50, 200, 300, and 500kpc/h are 34.0%, 11.1%, 8.0%, 6.5%, and 2.0% respectively at z=0.7. The probability is sensitive to the underlying pairwise velocity distribution and the merger rate of clusters. Future observations on the offsets for a large number of clusters may put strong constraints on the cosmic velocity fields on the cluster scale and the cluster merger rate. (Abridged)Comment: 25 pages, 15 figure