HEAD Division Meeting 1999, April 1999
Session 13. Clusters and Galaxies
Oral, Tuesday, April 13, 1999, 8:30am-10:10am, Colonial Room

## [13.07] Hard power-law emission components in the X-ray spectra of elliptical galaxies

T. Di Matteo (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), S.W. Allen (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK)

We report the first detections of hard power-law emission components in the X-ray spectra of six giant elliptical galaxies with previously-reported evidence for supermassive black holes in their nuclei. The observations were carried out with the ASCA satellite.The mean photon index, \Gamma=1.2, and luminosities of the detected power-law components (LX,1-10 ~2.6 \times 1040-2.1 \times 1042 ergs-1) suggest that the emission originates in the accretion process around the central black holes and is most plausibly due to low-radiative efficiency accretion. Detailed models and important implications of this discovery are discussed.

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