Constraining The Black Hole Spin Of Arakelian 120
Creators: name: Tu, Corinne
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2012
Subjects: Rotating black holes
Black holes
Astronomy

description: A ~100ks Suzaku observation (4 April 2007) of the Arakelian 120 (Ark 120) bare Seyfert 1 galaxy produces an X-ray spectrum with features from a soft excess, hard excess, and extended structure in the iron line band (Nardini et al. 2011). We compare this to the previously examined (Patrick et al. 2011) ~112ks XMM-Newton observation (24 August 2003). We model the spectrum by first building a phenomenological model using blackbody, Gaussian, and accretion disk components with and without relativistic effects convolved. Then, we allow a black hole spin parameter to vary freely within a self-consistent physical model that assumes all three excess features result from the same Comptonization process. As bare Seyferts lack substantial volumes of photoionized gas near their central regions, the possibility of absorption features masking the intrinsic properties of our spectral continuum is remote. With the advantage of multi-epoch and multi-instrument data, we make constrain the spin of the supermassive black hole at the center of Ark 120 to be 0.94 −0.01or +0.01.
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