2026/07/22 by Alfredo Luminari, Fabrizio Nicastro, Roberto Serafinelli +5
#astro-ph.HE #astro-ph.GA
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are one of the most powerful sources in the Universe. The accretion-liberated energy can strongly impact the surrounding environment, up to the host galaxy and beyond. Notwithstanding their ubiquitous presence, nuclear outflows are poorly characterised, mainly due to the degeneracy between their number density ne and radial location r, intrinsic in the photoionisation equilibrium models which are usually employed to fit the observations. This degeneracy prevents a self-consistent determination of the gas energetics and, therefore, of the efficiency in transporting the AGN energy outwards. We analyse a joint XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observation of the bright, highly-variable AGN NGC 4051. The high flux allows to perform time-resolved spectroscopy and, thus, to study the evolution of its three main ionised absorbers. Since the timescale of the gas ionisation variability depends on its number density, constraining it allows to break the density-distance degeneracy. We employ the Time-Evolving PhotoIonisation Device (TEPID) to model the temporal evolution of the outflows. We split the observation in 37 time-resolved spectra, each few kiloseconds long (total duration 160 ksec), and we fit them jointly with the time-resolved ionised spectra. We fully constrain ne=107 cm-3 and r=104 gravitational radii for the absorber with the highest opacity and intermediate ionisation. This distance is the same of the optical and UV Broad Line Region and of the soft X-ray emission lines. The fastest and most ionised absorber is at r<600 rG, cospatial with the broad component of the Fe Kα line. The slowest and least ionised absorber is at r ≥ 3.8 ⋅ 105 rG, the same distance of the cold torus and the narrow Fe Kα. The total energy outflow rate is below 10-4 Lbol, ruling out a meaningful mechanical impact on the host galaxy.