Survival of the obscuring torus in the most powerful active galactic nuclei

Mateos, S.; Carrera, F.; Barcons, X.; Alonso-Herrero, A.; Hernan-Caballero, A.; Page, M.; Ramos-Almeida, C.; Caccianiga, A.; Miyaji, T.; Blain, A.
Bibliographical reference

The X-ray Universe 2017, Proceedings of the conference held 6-9 June, 2017 in Rome, Italy. Edited by J.-U. Ness and S. Migliari. Online at https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/2017-symposium, p.142

Advertised on:
10
2017
Number of authors
10
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
1
Refereed citations
1
Description
Dedicated searches suggest that the fraction of obscured Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) decreases substantially with increasing luminosity. To explain these findings receding torus models have often been adopted. We have determined the intrinsic fraction of optical type-2 AGN at z<1 and X-ray luminosities from 10^{42} to 10^{45} erg/s. We used a complete X-ray selected sample of 199 AGN, from the Bright Ultrahard XMM-Newton Survey, and the distributions of torus covering factors for our AGN derived from CLUMPY torus models. By equating these distributions to the observed fraction of type 2 AGN in BUXS we revealed a population of X-ray undetected objects with high-covering factor tori, which are increasingly numerous at higher AGN luminosities. When these 'missing' objects are included, we found that Compton-thick AGN account at most for ˜35% of the total population. The intrinsic type-2 AGN fraction is ˜58% and has a weak, non-significant luminosity dependence. Our findings imply that the majority of luminous rapidly-accreting supermassive black holes at z<1 reside in highly-obscured nuclear environments but most of them are so deeply embedded that they have so far escaped detection in X-rays in <10 keV wide-area surveys.