The best broths are cooked in the oldest pans: revisiting the archival HST/FOC observations of quasars

TL;DR

This paper revisits archival HST/FOC ultraviolet polarimetry data of 26 AGNs, developing a standardized reduction pipeline to analyze previously unprocessed observations, with initial results on NGC 1068.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, open-access data reduction pipeline for archival AGN observations, enabling consistent analysis and new insights.

Findings

Preliminary polarization map of NGC 1068 obtained.

Standardized pipeline improves data consistency.

Revealed new features in AGN polarimetry data.

Abstract

The Faint Object Camera (FOC) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observed 26 individual active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in ultraviolet imaging polarimetry between 1990 and 2002. Tremendous progresses have been made thanks to those high spatial resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio observations, such as the identification of the location of hidden active nuclei and the three dimensional arrangement of polar material within the first hundred of parsecs around the central core. However, not all AGN observations have been reduced and analyzed, and none in a standardized framework. In this lecture note, we present our project of downloading, reducing and analyzing all the AGN HST/FOC observations that were achieved using a consistent, novel and open-access reduction pipeline. We briefly present our methodology and show the first, preliminary result from our reduction pipeline: NGC 1068.