X-ray study of accretion flow in narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies

We present the results of a systematic study of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) observed with XMM-Newton. The 2–12 keV X-ray spectra of NLS1s are well represented by a single power law with a photon index Γ ∼ 2. When this hard power law continuum is extrapolated into the low energy band, we found that all objects in our sample show prominent soft excess emission. This excess emission is well parameterized by the thermal emission expected from an optically thick accretion disk, and we found the following three peculiar features: (1) The derived disk temperatures are significantly higher than the expectation from a standard Shakura-Sunyaev accretion disk, if we assume a central mass of a black hole to be 10^6–8M_⊙. (2) The temperatures are distributed within narrow range (ΔkT ∼ 0.08 keV) with an average temperature of 0.18 keV in spite of the range of four orders of magnitude in luminosity (10^41–45 erg s⁻¹). (3) We found a peculiar temperature–luminosity relation, where the luminosity seems to be almost saturated in spite of the significant change in temperature, during the observations of the most luminous NLS1 PKS 0558-504. These results strongly suggest that the standard accretion disk picture is no longer appropriate in the nuclei of NLS1s. We discuss a possible origin for the soft excess component, and suggest that a slim disk may be able to explain the observational results, if the photon trapping effect is properly taken into account.     

X射线脉冲星自主导航的光子到达时间转换

根据广义相对论的后牛顿近似时空理论, 在忽略太阳系天体自转和扁率的情况下, 详细推导出X射线脉冲星自主导航中, 光子到达观测航天器和太阳系质心的时间差值, 它是对现行公式的修正．导出了质心坐标时与航天器固有时的变换关系, 根据这一关系, 建议在脉冲星导航的工程设计中可以仿照GPS, 将航天器携带时钟作频率调整, 从而有利于工程计算.      

Distributed satellite autonomous navigation using X-ray pulsars

Distributed X-ray pulsar-based navigation (DXNAV) is an effective method to realize earth-orbit satellite positioning under weak pulsar signal conditions. In this paper, we propose a new DXNAV method based on multiple information fusion. The DXNAV system principle and the pulse phase estimate Cramér-Rao lower bound are deduced. To suppress the calculation complexity and the error source, the X-ray pulsar photon time-of-arrival detected by each satellite is equivalently converted to the leading satellite directly using the inter-satellite link ranging and starlight angular distance measurement. A high precision estimate model of the pulse phase is built using pulsar standard profile, observed profile, and star-geocentric angular distance from distributed satellites. The estimated pulse phase is real-time supplied to the navigation system, which is established in the form of a deviation equation. The two-stage Kalman filter is designed to estimate the pulse phase in profile histogram bin step and the leader position in real-time step. Compared separately with the maximum likelihood phase estimate method and the celestial navigation method using only the star-geocentric angular distance, the simulation analysis shows that the estimation precisions of position and velocity are improved by 29% and 25%.