Frying Doughnuts: What can the reprocessing of X-rays to IR tell us about the AGN environment?

TL;DR

This study investigates the reprocessing of X-ray radiation into IR in AGN by analyzing luminosity ratios, revealing a highly uniform central engine in most AGN and identifying IR ratios as indicators of obscuration levels.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of IR to X-ray luminosity ratios in diverse AGN, constraining models of the AGN environment and obscuration.

Findings

90% of Type I AGN have a narrow IR/X-ray luminosity ratio range

The IR ratio effectively distinguishes heavily obscured from unobscured AGN

AGN central engines are more uniform than previously thought

Abstract

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) produce vast amounts of high energy radiation deep in their central engines. X-rays either escape the AGN or are absorbed and re-emitted mostly as IR. By studying the dispersion in the ratio of observed mid-IR luminosity to observed 2-10keV X-ray luminosity (R_{ir/x}) in AGN we can investigate the reprocessing material (possibly a torus or donut of dust) in the AGN central engine, independent of model assumptions. We studied the ratio of observed mid-IR and 2-10keV X-ray luminosities in a heterogeneous sample of 245 AGN from the literature. We found that when we removed AGN with prominent jets, ~90% of Type I AGN lay within a very tight dispersion in luminosity ratio (1<R_{ir/x}<30). This implies that the AGN central engine is extremely uniform and models of the physical AGN environment (e.g. cloud cover, turbulent disk, opening angle of absorbing structures such as dusty tori) must span a very narrow range of parameters. We also found that the far-IR(100um) to mid-IR (12um) observed luminosity ratio is an effective descriminator between heavily obscured AGN and relatively unobscured AGN.