The Origin of The Soft X-Ray Excess in the Seyfert 1.5 Galaxy ESO 362-G18

Abstract

We review the Seyfert 1.5 Galaxy ESO 362-G18 for exploring the origin of the soft X-ray excess. The Warm Corona and Relativistic Reflection models are two main scenarios to interpret the soft X-ray excess in active galactic nuclei at present. We use the simultaneous X-ray observation data of XMM-Newton and NuSTAR on 2016 September 24 to perform spectral analysis in two steps. First, we analyze the time-average spectra by using Warm Corona and Relativistic Reflection models. Moreover, we also explore the Hybrid model, Double Reflection model and Double Warm Corona model. We find that both the Warm Corona and Relativistic Reflection models can interpret the time-average spectra well but cannot be distinguished easily based on the time-averaged spectra fit statistics. Second, we add the rms and covariance spectra to perform the spectral analysis with time-average spectra. The result shows that the warm corona could reproduce all of these spectra well. The hot, optical thin corona and neutral distant reflection will increase their contribution with the temporal frequency, meaning that the corona responsible for X-ray continuum comes from the inner compact X-ray region and the neutral distant reflection is made of some moderate scale neutral clumps.