Quasi periodic oscillations in active galactic nuclei

Abstract

Quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) are coherent peaks of variability power observed in the X-ray power spectra (PSDs) of stellar mass X-ray binaries (XRBs). A scale invariance of the accretion process implies they should be present in the active galactic nuclei. The first robust detection was a ∼ 1 h periodicity in the Seyfert galaxy RE J1034+396 from a ∼ 90 ks XMM-Newton observation; however, subsequent observations failed to detect the QPO in the 0.3-10.0 keV band. In this talk we present the recent detection of the ∼ 1 h periodicity in the 1.0-4.0 keV band of 4 further low-flux/spectrally-harder observations of RE J1034+396 (see Alston et al. 2014). We also present recent work on the discovery of a QPO in the Seyfert galaxy, MS 2254.9-3712, which again is only detected in energy bands associated with the primary power-law continuum emission (Alston et al. 2015). We conclude these features are most likely analogous to the high-frequency QPOs observed in XRBs. In both sources, we also see evidence for X-ray reverberation at the QPO frequency, where soft X-ray bands and Iron Kα emission lag the primary X-ray continuum. These time delays may provide another diagnostic for understanding the underlying QPO mechanism observed in accreting black holes.