The Phoenix galaxy as seen by NuSTAR

Creators: Masini, A.; Comastri, A.; Puccetti, S.; Baloković, M.; Gandhi, P.; Guainazzi, M.; Bauer, F. E.; Boggs, S. E.; Boorman, P. G.; Brightman, M.; Christensen, F. E.; Craig, W. W.; Farrah, D.; Hailey, C. J.; Harrison, F. A.; Koss, M. J.; LaMassa, S. M.; Ricci, C.; Stern, D.; Walton, D. J.; Zhang, W. W.

Abstract

Aims. We study the long-term variability of the well-known Seyfert 2 galaxy Mrk 1210 (also known as UGC 4203, or the Phoenix galaxy). Methods. The source was observed by many X-ray facilities in the last 20 yr. Here we present a NuSTAR observation and put the results in the context of previously published observations. Results. NuSTAR observed Mrk 1210 in 2012 for 15.4 ks. The source showed Compton-thin obscuration similar to that observed by Chandra, Suzaku, BeppoSAX and XMM-Newton over the past two decades, but different from the first observation by ASCA in 1995, in which the active nucleus was caught in a low flux state or was obscured by Compton-thick matter with a reflection-dominated spectrum. Thanks to the high-quality hard X-ray spectrum obtained with NuSTAR and exploiting the long-term spectral coverage spanning 16.9 yr, we can precisely disentangle the transmission and reflection components and put constraints on both the intrinsic long-term variability and hidden nucleus scenarios. In the former case, the distance between the reflector and the source must be at least ~2 pc, while in the latter the eclipsing cloud may be identified with a water maser-emitting clump.

Additional Information

© ESO, 2017. Received: 1 August 2016. Accepted: 1 September 2016. Published online 11 January 2017. We thank the anonymous referee for useful suggestions that helped to improve the paper. This work was supported under NASA Contract NNG08FD60C, and it made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software, and Calibration teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA). This research has also made use of data obtained from the Chandra Data Archive and the Chandra Source Catalog, and software provided by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC). A.M., A.C., and S.P. acknowledge support from the ASI/INAF grant I/037/12/0-011/13. M.B. acknowledges support from NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program, grant NNX14AQ07H. P.G. and P.B. thank STFC for support (grant ST/J003697/2). S.L.M. is supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Universities Space Research Association under contract with NASA. We acknowledge support from NASA NuSTAR A01 Award NNX15AV27G (F.E.B.), CONICYT-Chile grants Basal-CATA PFB-06/2007 (F.E.B., C.R.), FONDECYT Regular 1141218 (F.E.B., C.R.), "EMBIGGEN" Anillo ACT1101 (F.E.B., C.R.), the China-CONICYT fund (C.R.), and the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism's Millennium Science Initiative through grant IC120009, awarded to The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, MAS (F.E.B.).

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