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Published August 2020 | Accepted Version + Published
Journal Article Open

A Compton-thick nucleus in the dual active galactic nuclei of Mrk 266

Abstract

We present the results from our analysis of NuSTAR data of the luminous infrared galaxy Mrk 266, which contains two nuclei, south-western (SW) and north-eastern (NE), which were resolved in previous Chandra imaging. Combining this with the Chandra data, we intepret the hard X-ray spectrum obtained from a NuSTAR observation to result from a steeply rising flux from a Compton-thick active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the SW nucleus which is very faint in the Chandra band, confirming the previous claim. This hard X-ray component is dominated by reflection, and its intrinsic 2–10 keV luminosity is likely to be ∼1 × 10⁴³ erg s⁻¹. Although it is bright in soft X-ray, only a moderately absorbed NE nucleus has a 2–10 keV luminosity of 4 × 10⁴¹ erg s⁻¹, placing it in the low-luminosity AGN class. These results have implications for understanding the detectability and duty cycles of emission from dual AGN in heavily obscured mergers.

Additional Information

© 2020 ESO. Article published by EDP Sciences. Received 27 May 2020; Accepted 6 July 2020; Published online 19 August 2020. This research made use of data obtained from NuSTAR, XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray Observatory, software packages of HEASoft and R (R Core Team 2017), and the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Databases (NED), which is funded by the National Aeronatutics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology. KI acknowledges support by the Spanish MICINN under grant PID2019-105510GB-C33. T. D-S. acknowledges support from the CASSACA and CONICYT fund CAS-CONICYT Call 2018. C. R. acknowledges support from the Fondecyt Iniciacion grant 11190831. ASE, GCP and KI acknowledge NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) Grant 80NSSC20K0450 (PI: U). ASE was also supported by NSF grant AST 1816838.

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Published - aa38513-20.pdf

Accepted Version - 2007.03258.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 20, 2023