Discovery of soft and hard X-ray time lags in low-mass AGNs

Abstract

The scaling relations between the black hole (BH) mass and soft lag properties for both active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and BH X-ray binaries (BHXRBs) suggest the same underlying physical mechanism at work in accreting BH systems spanning a broad range of mass. However, the low-mass end of AGNs has never been explored in detail. In this work, we extend the existing scaling relations to lower mass AGNs, which serve as anchors between the normal-mass AGNs and BHXRBs. For this purpose, we construct a sample of low-mass AGNs ( $M_{\rm BH}\lt 3\times 10^{6} \, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ ) from the XMM-Newton archive and measure frequency-resolved time-delays between the soft (0.3-1 keV) and hard (1-4 keV) X-ray emissions. We report that the soft band lags behind the hard band emission at high frequencies ∼[1.3-2.6] × 10^-3 Hz, which is interpreted as a sign of reverberation from the inner accretion disc in response to the direct coronal emission. At low frequencies (∼[3-8] × 10^-4 Hz), the hard-band lags behind the soft-band variations, which we explain in the context of the inward propagation of luminosity fluctuations through the corona. Assuming a lamppost geometry for the corona, we find that the X-ray source of the sample extends at an average height and radius of ∼10r_g and ∼6r_g, respectively. Our results confirm that the scaling relations between the BH mass and soft lag amplitude/frequency derived for higher mass AGNs can safely extrapolate to lower mass AGNs, and the accretion process is indeed independent of the BH mass.