Radiation mechanisms and physical properties of the γ-ray narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the physical properties and radiation mechanisms of 11 states of five narrow-line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) galaxies detected by the Large Area Telescope on board Fermi through modeling the quasi-simultaneous multi-band observations. We obtain the best-fitting model parameters and their uncertainties for each state with the χ2-minimization procedure and discuss their implications on the characteristics of jet. Similar to blazars, their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) have a two-humped structure and their non-thermal emission can be modelled with the single-zone synchrotron + inverse Compton (IC) model. For all states, the GeV γ-rays may be contributed by the external Compton (EC) emission components. The observations of Fermi are mostly located at the declining stage of the EC humps. Text < 0.5 eV in all cases (Text is the characteristic temperature of external soft photons), suggesting that their radiation zones may be usually located outside of the broad line region (BLR) and the soft photons of Compton scattering mainly come from the dust torus. Compared with the bright Fermi blazars studied by Ghisellini et al. (2014, Nature, 515, 376), the Pjet (the power of the jets) of NLS1 galaxies detected by Fermi is similar to that of the flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) but a little larger than that of the BL Lac objects (BL Lacs). However, a comparison of Pr (the powers of radiations) with the FSRQs and BL Lac objects shows that NLS1 galaxies’ Pr has values comparable to BL Lac objects but lower than FSRQs in spite of having similar Pjet values and the same energy carrier (the cold protons) as the FSRQs. Observations indicate that γ-NLS1 galaxies might have lower η (efficiency of gravitational energy release) values than GeV blazars.