Spectral evidence of excess extended X-ray emission in the soft band, relative to the expected contribution from nuclear (PSF) emission in the 2″–4″ annulus. Top panel: Energy-dependent rescaling factors derived from simulated PSFs, used to estimate the nuclear spillover contribution to the annular spectrum. Middle panel: Spectrum extracted from the central 2″ (black points; binned to at least 50 counts per bin) fitted with an AGN component (solid black line), compared to the spectrum extracted from the 2″-4″ annulus (red points; binned to at least 10 counts per bin), and the predicted nuclear spillover (dashed black line). Bottom panel: Residuals σ in the annulus after subtracting the nuclear spillover component.