X-ray spectral variability of Active Galactic Nuclei from XMM-Newton data

The X-ray spectral variability of Active Galactic Nuclei typically follows a “softer when brighter” trend, which is believed to be originated mainly from the superposition of different spectral components, varying independently from each other, although some intrinsic variations of the continuum are also possible. We analyzed the MEXSAS sample, made up by more than 7800 observations from 2700 quasars from the fifth release of the XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue (3XMM-SSC), cross-matched with two quasar catalogues, SDSS-DR7Q and SDSS-DR12Q. We developed a technique that is able to compute estimates of the photon index from approximate spectral fits, using the fluxes in the catalogue. Following Trevese & Vagnetti (2002), we quantify the spectral variability using β = −∆Γ/∆ log F. We find an ensemble softer when brighter trend, extending therefore this result to quasars, and the same result is found for eight single sources extracted from the catalogue, plus one (PG 1114+445) discarded because of the presence of a prominent warm absorber, although with different extent. To investigate the reason for this range of different values of beta, we investigated a sample of X-ray bright sources taken from the samples of Sobolewska & Papadakis (2009), plus M81, for which it is possible to obtain accurate photon indices. We compute both the accurate and approximate photon indices and we confront β obtained with both methods. Finally, we studied the spectra of 13 observations of PG 1114+445, finding multiple absorbers, one possibly being a highly ionized, ultra-fast outflow, with velocity of about 15% of the speed of light, which is observable in four observations.