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XMM-Newton Observations of Seyfert Galaxies from the Palomar Spectroscopic Survey: the X-Ray Absorption Distribution

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XMM-Newton Observations of Seyfert Galaxies from the Palomar Spectroscopic Survey: the X-Ray Absorption Distribution A&A 500, 999–1012 (2009) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/200811371 & c ESO 2009 Astrophysics XMM-Newton observations of Seyfert galaxies from the Palomar spectroscopic survey: the X-ray absorption distribution A. Akylas and I. Georgantopoulos Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics, National Observatory of Athens, I. Metaxa & B. Pavlou, Penteli, 15236 Athens, Greece Received 18 November 2008 / Accepted 16 March 2009 ABSTRACT We present XMM-Newton spectral analysis of all 38 Seyfert galaxies from the Palomar spectroscopic sample of galaxies. These are found at distances of up to 67 Mpc and cover the absorbed 2–10 keV luminosity range ∼1038–1043 erg s−1. Our aim is to determine the distribution of the X-ray absorption in the local Universe. Three of these are Compton-thick with column densities just above 24 −2 10 cm and high equivalent width FeKα lines (>700 eV). Five more sources have low values of the X-ray to [OIII] flux ratio suggesting that they could be associated with obscured nuclei. Their individual spectra show neither high absorbing columns nor flat 23 −2 spectral indices. However, their stacked spectrum reveals an absorbing column density of NH ∼ 10 cm . Therefore the fraction of absorbed sources (>1022 cm−2) could be as high as 55 ± 12%. A number of Seyfert-2 appear to host unabsorbed nuclei. These are 41 −1 associated with low-luminosity sources LX < 3 × 10 erg s . Their stacked spectrum again shows no absorption while inspection of the Chandra images, where available, shows that contamination from nearby sources does not affect the XMM-Newton spectra in most cases. Nevertheless, such low luminosity sources are not contributing significantly to the X-ray background flux. When we consider only the brighter, >1041 erg s−1, 21 sources, we find that the fraction of absorbed nuclei rises to 75 ± 19% while that of Compton-thick sources to 15–20%. The fraction of Compton-thick AGN is lower than that predicted by the X-ray background synthesis model in the same luminosity and redshift range. Key words. surveys – X-rays: galaxies – X-rays: general 1. Introduction Compton-thick AGN (see Comastri 2004, for a review) where the Compton scattering on the bound electrons becomes signif- The moderate to high redshift Universe has been probed at un- icant. Despite the fact that Compton-thick AGN are abundant parallelled depth with the most sensitive observations performed in our vicinity (e.g. NGC 1068, Circinus), only a few tens of at X-ray wavelengths in the Chandra Deep fields. The Chandra Compton-thick sources have been identified from X-ray data 2Ms observations (Alexander et al. 2003; Luo et al. 2008)re- (Comastri 2004). Although the population of Compton-thick solved about 80 per cent of the extragalactic X-ray light in the sources remains elusive there is concrete evidence for its pres- hard 2–10 keV band (see Brandt & Hasinger 2005,forare- ence. The X-ray background synthesis models can explain the view). These deep surveys find a sky density of 5000 sources per peak of the X-ray background at 30–40 keV, where most of its square degree, the vast majority of which are found to be AGN energy density lies, (Frontera et al. 2007;Churazovetal.2007) through optical spectroscopy (e.g. Barger et al. 2003). In con- only by invoking a large number of Compton-thick AGN (Gilli trast, the optical surveys for QSOs (e.g. the COMBO-17 survey) et al. 2007). Additional evidence for the presence of a Compton- reach only a surface density about an order of magnitude lower thick population comes from the directly measured space den- (e.g. Wolf et al. 2003). This clearly demonstrates the power of sity of black holes in the local Universe. It is found that this X-ray surveys for detecting AGN. This is because hard X-rays space density is a factor of two higher than that predicted from can penetrate large amounts of gas without suffering from sig- the X-ray luminosity function (Marconi et al. 2004). This imme- nificant absorption. Indeed detailed spectral analysis on X-ray diately suggests that the X-ray luminosity function is missing an selected AGN reveals large amount of obscuration (e.g. Akylas appreciable number of obscured AGN. et al. 2006; Tozzi et al. 2006; Georgantopoulos et al. 2007). In In recent years there have been many efforts to uncover heav- particular, about two thirds of the X-ray sources, over all lumi- 22 −2 ily obscured and in particular Compton-thick AGN in the local nosities, present column densities higher than 10 cm .These Universe by examining IR or optically selected, [OIII], AGN high absorbing columns are believed to originate in a molecular samples. This is because both the IR and the narrow-line re- torus surrounding the nucleus. gion originate beyond the obscuring region and thus represent However, even the efficient 2–10 keV X-ray surveys may be an isotropic property of the AGN. Risaliti et al. (1999)exam- missing a fraction of highly obscured sources. This is because at ine the X-ray properties of a large sample of [OIII] selected very high obscuring column densities (>1024 cm−2, correspond- Seyfert-2 galaxies whose X-ray spectra were available in the ing to an optical reddening of AV > 100), the X-ray photons literature. They find a large fraction of Compton-thick sources with energies between 2 and 10 keV are absorbed. These are the (over half of their sample). Their estimates are complemented by Article published by EDP Sciences 1000 A. Akylas and I. Georgantopoulos: X-ray absorption in the local universe more recent XMM-Newton observations of local AGN samples 3. X-ray observations (Cappi et al. 2006; Panessa et al. 2006; Guainazzi et al. 2005). All these authors also claim a large Compton-thick AGN frac- The X-ray data have been obtained with the EPIC (European tion exceeding 30 per cent of the Seyfert-2 population. The ad- Photon Imaging Cameras, Strüder et al. 2001; Turner et al. 2001) vent of the SWIFT and INTEGRAL missions which carry X-ray on board XMM-Newton. Thirty sources have been recovered from the XMM-Newton archive while the remaining ten objects detectors with imaging capabilities (e.g. Barthelmy et al. 2005; Ubertini et al. 2003) in ultra-hard X-rays (15–200 keV) try to (marked with a “ ”inTable2) have been observed by us during shed new light on the absorption properties of AGN in the lo- the Guest Observer program. cal Universe. In principle, at these ultra-hard X-rays obscura- The log of all the XMM-Newton observations is shown tion should play a negligible role, at least up to column densities in Table 2. The data have been analysed using the Scientific as high as 1025 cm−2. However, because of the limited effec- Analysis Software (SAS v.7.1). We produce event files for tive area the above surveys can provide X-ray samples, down to both the PN and the MOS observations using the EPCHAIN very bright fluxes 10−11 erg cm−2 s−1, with limited quality spec- and EMCHAIN tasks of SAS respectively. The event files are tra. Again XMM-Newton observations are often required to de- screened for high particle background periods. In our analysis termine the column density in each source. Interestingly, these we deal only with events corresponding to patterns 0–4 for the surveys find only a limited number of Compton-thick sources PN and 0–12 for the MOS instruments. (Markwardt et al. 2005; Bassani et al. 2006; Malizia et al. 2007; The source spectra are extracted from circular regions with radius of 20 arcsec. This area encircles at least the 70 per cent of Ajello 2008; Winter et al. 2008; Tueller et al. 2008; Sazonov ff et al. 2008). the all the X-ray photons at o -axis angles less than 10 arcmin. Here, we present XMM-Newton observations of all 38 A ten times larger source-free area is used for the background Seyfert galaxies in the Palomar spectroscopic sample of nearby estimation. The response and ancillary files are also produced galaxies (Ho et al. 1997). This is the largest complete optically using SAS tasks RMFGEN and ARFGEN respectively. selected AGN sample in the local Universe analyzed so far. 23 of We note that 18 of the XMM-Newton observations pre- the Seyfert galaxies presented here have already been discussed sented here, coincide with these presented in Cappi et al. (2006). in previous works (e.g. Cappi et al. 2006). For 5 of them newer However we choose to re-analyze these common data-sets in or- XMM-Newton observations are available and are presented here. der to present a uniform treatment of the sample. The current work should provide the most unbiased census of the AGN column density distribution at low redshifts and lumi- nosities. 4. X-ray spectral analysis We investigate the X-ray properties of the sources in our sam- 2. The sample ple by performing spectral fittings with XSPEC v.12.4 software package. 2 sources are excluded from the X-ray spectral anal- The Seyfert sample used in this study is derived from the ysis: the Seyfert-2 galaxy NGC185 for being undetected in the Palomar optical spectroscopic survey of nearby galaxies (Ho X-rays (see also Sect. 2), and the Seyfert-1.5 galaxy NGC 1275 et al. 1995). This survey has taken high quality spectra of 486 which belongs to the Perseus cluster and whose X-ray image ◦ bright (BT < 12.5 mag), northern (δ>0 ) galaxies selected shows that its flux is heavily contaminated by diffuse emission.
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