Can we measure black hole spin in quasar 4C 74.26?

We modeled broadband X-ray spectra from Suzaku and NuSTAR with MYTORUS, which self-consistently accounts for Fe Kα line emission, as well as direct and reflected continuum emission, from finite column density matter. A narrow unresolved Fe Kα emission line originating in an X-ray reprocessor with solar abundance far from the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) is sufficient to produce excellent fits for all spectra. For the first time, we are able to measure the global, out of the line-of-sight column density to be in the range ∼1.5 to ∼2.9 × 10²⁴ cm^-2, i.e. in the Compton thick regime, while the line-of-sight column density is Compton thin in all observations. Unlike the great majority of previous analyses that modeled these data with a relativistically broadened Fe Kα emission line, our results suggest that the reprocessed X-ray emission present in these 4C 74.26 X-ray data does not arise in the inner accretion disk and thus is not useful for constraining SMBH spin.