Bibcode
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
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.