3 years ago

# Compton thick AGN in the NuSTAR era.

Lea Marcotulli, Cristian Vignali, Stefano Marchesi, Giorgio Lanzuisi, Andrea Comastri, Marco Ajello

We present the 2-100 keV spectral analysis of 30 candidate Compton thick (CT-) active galactic nuclei (AGN) selected in the Swift-BAT 100-month survey. The average redshift of these objects is $\langle z\rangle\sim$0.03 and they all lie within $\sim$500 Mpc. We used the MyTorus (Murphy et al. 2009) model to perform X-ray spectral fitting both without and with the contribution of the NuSTAR data in the 3-50 keV energy range. When the NuSTAR data are added to the fit, 14 out of 30 of these objects (47% of the whole sample) have intrinsic absorption N$_{\rm H}<10^{24}$ cm$^{-2}$ at the %CONTENT%gt;$3$\sigma$confidence level, i.e., they are re-classified from Compton thick to Compton thin. Consequently, we infer an overall observed fraction of CT-AGN with respect to the whole AGN population lower than the one reported in previous works, and as low as$\sim$4%. We find evidence that this over-estimation of N$_{\rm H}\$ is likely due to the low quality of a subsample of spectra, either in the 2-10 keV band or in the Swift-BAT one.

Publisher URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03166

DOI: arXiv:1801.03166v1

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