BASS. XLII. The Relation between the Covering Factor of Dusty Gas and the Eddington Ratio in Nearby Active Galactic Nuclei

Creators: Ricci, C.; Ichikawa, K.; Stalevski, M.; Kawamuro, T.; Yamada, S.; Ueda, Y.; Mushotzky, R.; Privon, G. C.; Koss, M. J.; Trakhtenbrot, B.; Fabian, A. C.; Ho, L. C.; Asmus, D.; Bauer, F. E.; Chang, C. S.; Gupta, K. K.; Oh, K.; Powell, M.; Pfeifle, R. W.; Rojas, A.; Ricci, F.; Temple, M. J.; Toba, Y.; Tortosa, A.; Treister, E.; Harrison, F.¹; Stern, D.^{2, 1}; Urry, C. M.

1. California Institute of Technology
2. Jet Propulsion Lab

Abstract

Accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) located at the centers of galaxies are typically surrounded by large quantities of gas and dust. The structure and evolution of this circumnuclear material can be studied at different wavelengths, from the submillimeter to the X-ray. Recent X-ray studies have shown that the covering factor of the obscuring material tends to decrease with increasing Eddington ratio, likely due to radiative feedback on dusty gas. Here we study a sample of 549 nearby (z ≲ 0.1) hard X-ray (14–195 keV) selected nonblazar active galactic nuclei (AGN) and use the ratio between the AGN infrared and bolometric luminosity as a proxy of the covering factor. We find that, in agreement with what has been found by X-ray studies of the same sample, the covering factor decreases with increasing Eddington ratio. We also confirm previous findings that showed that obscured AGN typically have larger covering factors than unobscured sources. Finally, we find that the median covering factors of AGN located in different regions of the column density–Eddington ratio diagram are in good agreement with what would be expected from a radiation-regulated growth of SMBHs.

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank the referee for comments, which helped us improve the quality of our manuscript. We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation of China 11721303, 11991052, 12011540375, and 12233001 (L.H.); the National Key R&D Program of China 2022YFF0503401 (L.H.); the China Manned Space Project CMS-CSST-2021-A04 and CMS-CSST-2021-A06 (L.H.); Fondecyt Regular grant 1230345 (C.R.) and ANID BASAL project FB210003 (C.R., F.E.B., E.T.); NASA through ADAP award NNH16CT03C (M.K.); the Israel Science Foundation through grant No. 1849/19 (B.T.); the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program through grant agreement No. 950533 (B.T.); Fondecyt fellowship No. 3220516 (M.T.); the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute under the R&D program (project No. 2022-1-868-04) supervised by the Ministry of Science and ICT (K.O.); the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020R1C1C1005462) (K.O.); Fondecyt Postdoctorado 3210157 (A.R.); RIN MIUR 2017 project "Black Hole winds and the Baryon Life Cycle of Galaxies: the stone-guest at the galaxy evolution supper," contract 2017PH3WAT (F.R.); the ANID—Millennium Science Initiative Program—ICN12_009 (F.E.B.); CATA-Basal—ACE210002 (F.E.B., E.T.); FONDECYT Regular—1190818 (F.E.B., E.T.) and 1200495 (F.E.B., E.T.); Núcleo Milenio NCN_058 (E.T.); the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, PROMIS 6060916, BOWIE; and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia through contract No. 451-03-9/2023-14/200002 (M.S.). This work made use of data from the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which are operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of data and/or software provided by the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), which is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Facilities

Swift - Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, WISE - Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, IRAS - InfraRed Astronomical Satellite, Akari - Akari (ASTRO-F), Spitzer - Spitzer Space Telescope satellite

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