Soft X-ray Emission of Quasars

Abstract

From a list of known quasars compiled from various catalogues we selected all sources detected by the PSPC (0.1 – 2.4 keV) aboard ROSAT with more than 80 counts during the all sky survey. A sample of 102 sources resulted. At higher redshifts most of the selected sources are radio-loud. At a redshift smaller than 0.50 we found 54 radio-quiet quasars and 30 radio-loud sources. For this reduced sample the mean spectral index of the radio-quiet sources (< Γ > = 2.53) and that of the radio-loud ones (< Γ > = 2.26) are clearly different with a significance of 3.3 σ.About 2/3 of the bright quasars observed with Einstein also belong to our sample. The spectra observed with ROSAT are sytematically steeper than the ones observed with Einstein yielding a < ΓROSAT – ΓEinstein > of 0.66 ± 0.18 for radio quiet and of 0.68 ± 0.19 for radio-loud sources, respectively.For radio loud quasars, the mean spectral slope decreases from 2.3 to 1.5 when the redshift increases beyond 0.5 (figure 1). The fact that high redshift sources show a photon index of about 1.5, which is similar to the mean index observed with Einstein for radio-loud sources, suggests that this decrease towards higher redshifts can be interpreted by the shift of the soft X-ray excess outside of the ROSAT spectral band when the redshift increases. The solid lines in figure 1 represent theoretical pathes of the photon index as a function of the redshift as derived from simulations assuming a power law plus black body model spectrum for the quasars X-ray emission. In curve No 1 the powerlaw index is fixed to 1.4. To be compatible with the observation the temperature of the blackbody component must range between 50 and 70 eV. Curve No 2 asssumes the same model with a powerlaw index fixed to 1.8 to account for radio quiet sources.