The role of SPICA-like missions and the Origins Space Telescope in the quest for heavily obscured AGN and synergies with Athena

TL;DR

This paper explores how future IR missions like SPICA-like and OST, combined with the Athena X-ray observatory, can detect and study heavily obscured AGN, advancing understanding of black hole growth and the unresolved X-ray background.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of combined IR and X-ray surveys to detect over 90% of AGN, especially the most obscured, and provides strategies for characterizing high-redshift black hole activity.

Findings

Over 90% of AGN can be detected with combined IR and X-ray surveys.

Athena will effectively detect and characterize moderate- and high-luminosity AGN.

SPICA-like and OST missions will sample the most obscured Compton thick AGN.

Abstract

In the BH-galaxy co-evolution framework, most of the star-formation (SF) and the black hole (BH) accretion is expected to take place in highly obscured conditions. Thus, obscured AGN are difficult to identify in optical or X-ray bands, but shine bright in the IR. Moreover, X-ray background (XRB) synthesis models predict that a large fraction of the yet-unresolved XRB is due to the most obscured (Compton thick, CT) of these AGN. In this work, we investigate the synergies between putative IR missions (using SPICA, proposed for ESA/M5 but withdrawn in October 2020, and Origins Space Telescope, OST, as `templates') and the X-ray mission Athena, which should fly in early 2030s, in detecting and characterizing AGN, with a particular focus on the most obscured ones. Using an XRB synthesis model, we estimated the number of AGN and the number of those which will be detected in the X-rays. For each AGN we associated an optical-to-FIR SED from observed AGN with both X-ray data and SED decomposition, and used these SEDs to check if the AGN will be detected by SPICA-like or OST at IR wavelengths. We expect that, with the deepest Athena and SPICA-like (or OST) surveys, we will be able to detect in the IR more than $90\,\%$ of all the AGN (down to L$_{2-10\text{keV}} \sim 10^{42}\,$erg/s and up to $z \sim 10$) predicted by XRB synthesis modeling, and we will detect at least half of them in the X-rays. Athena will be extremely powerful in detecting and discerning moderate- and high-luminosity AGN. We find that the most obscured and elusive CT-AGN will be exquisitely sampled by SPICA-like mission or OST and that Athena will allow a fine characterization of the most-luminous ones. This will provide a significant step forward in the process of placing stronger constraints on the yet-unresolved XRB and investigating the BH accretion rate evolution up to very high redshift ($z \ge 4$).