Broadband X-ray observations of four gamma-ray narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies

Abstract

Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) is one of the few classes of active galactic nuclei harboring powerful relativistic jets and detected in γ-rays. NLS1s are well-known X-ray sources. While in non-jetted sources the origin of this X-ray emission may be a hot corona surrounding the accretion disk, in jetted objects, especially beamed ones, the contribution of corona and relativistic jet is difficult to disentangle without a proper sampling of the hard X-ray emission. For this reason, we observed with NuSTAR the first four NLS1s detected at high energy γ-rays. These data, along with XMM-Newton and Swift/XRT observations, confirmed that X-rays originate both in the jet and in the accretion disk corona. Time variability in hard X-rays furthermore suggests that, as observed in flat-spectrum radio quasars, the dissipation region during flares could change its position from source to source, and it can be located both inside and outside the broad-line region. We find that jetted NLS1s, and other blazars as well, seem not to follow the classical fundamental plane of black hole (BH) activity, which therefore should be used as a BH mass estimator in blazars with extreme care only. Our results strengthen the idea according to which γ-NLS1s are smaller and younger version of flat-spectrum radio quasars, in which both a Seyfert and a blazar component co-exist.