| 1. |
- Rahnev, D, et al.
(författare)
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The Confidence Database
- 2020
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Ingår i: Nature human behaviour. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2397-3374. ; 4:3, s. 317-325
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 2. |
- Ricci, C., et al.
(författare)
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A hard X-ray view of luminous and ultra-luminous infrared galaxies in GOALS - I. AGN obscuration along the merger sequence
- 2021
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Ingår i: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966. ; 506:4, s. 5935-5950
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The merger of two or more galaxies can enhance the inflow of material from galactic scales into the close environments of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), obscuring and feeding the supermassive black hole (SMBH). Both recent simulations and observations of AGN in mergers have confirmed that mergers are related to strong nuclear obscuration. However, it is still unclear how AGN obscuration evolves in the last phases of the merger process. We study a sample of 60 luminous and ultra-luminous IR galaxies (U/LIRGs) from the GOALS sample observed by NuSTAR. We find that the fraction of AGNs that are Compton thick (CT;N-H >= 10(24)cm(-2) ) peaks at at a late merger stage, prior to coalescence, when the nuclei have projected separations (d(sep)) of 0.4-6 kpc. A similar peak is also observed in the median N-H [[(1.6 +/- 0.5) x 10(24) cm(-2)].]. The vast majority (85(-9)(+7) per cent)) of the AGNs in the final merger stages (d(sep) less than or similar to 10 kpc) are heavily obscured (N-H = 10(23) cm(-2)), and the median N-H of the accreting SMBHs in our sample is systematically higher than that of local hard X-ray-selected AGN, regardless of the merger stage. This implies that these objects have very obscured nuclear environments, with the gas almost completely covering the AGN in late mergers. CT AGNs tend to have systematically higher absorption-corrected X-ray luminosities than less obscured sources. This could either be due to an evolutionary effect, with more obscured sources accreting more rapidly because they have more gas available in their surroundings, or to a selection bias. The latter scenario would imply that we are still missing a large fraction of heavily obscured, lower luminosity (L2-10 less than or similar to 10(43) erg s(-1)) AGNs in U/LIRGs.
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| 3. |
- Ricci, C., et al.
(författare)
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A Tight Correlation between Millimeter and X-Ray Emission in Accreting Massive Black Holes from
- 2023
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Ingår i: Astrophysical Journal Letters. - 2041-8213 .- 2041-8205. ; 952:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent studies have proposed that the nuclear millimeter continuum emission observed in nearby active galactic nuclei (AGNs) could be created by the same population of electrons that gives rise to the X-ray emission that is ubiquitously observed in accreting black holes. We present the results of a dedicated high-spatial-resolution (∼60-100 mas) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) campaign on a volume-limited (<50 Mpc) sample of 26 hard X-ray (>10 keV) selected radio-quiet AGNs. We find an extremely high detection rate (25/26 or 94 − 6 + 3 % ), which shows that nuclear emission at millimeter wavelengths is nearly ubiquitous in accreting SMBHs. Our high-resolution observations show a tight correlation between the nuclear (1-23 pc) 100 GHz and the intrinsic X-ray emission (1σ scatter of 0.22 dex). The ratio between the 100 GHz continuum and the X-ray emission does not show any correlation with column density, black hole mass, Eddington ratio, or star formation rate, which suggests that the 100 GHz emission can be used as a proxy of SMBH accretion over a very broad range of these parameters. The strong correlation between 100 GHz and X-ray emission in radio-quiet AGNs could be used to estimate the column density based on the ratio between the observed 2-10 keV ( F 2 - 10 keV obs ) and 100 GHz (F 100 GHz) fluxes. Specifically, a ratio log ( F 2 - 10 keV obs / F 100 GHz ) ≤ 3.5 strongly suggests that a source is heavily obscured ( log ( N H / cm − 2 ) ≳ 23.8 ). Our work shows the potential of ALMA continuum observations to detect heavily obscured AGNs (up to an optical depth of one at 100 GHz, i.e., N H ≃ 1027 cm−2), and to identify binary SMBHs with separations <100 pc, which cannot be probed by current X-ray facilities.
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