Confirmation of the nature of the absorber in IRAS 09104+4109

We present the first long Suzaku observation of the hyperluminous infrared galaxy IRAS 09104+4109 which is dominated by a Type 2 AGN. The infrared to X-ray spectral energy distribution (SED) indicates that the source is an obscured quasar with a Compton-thin absorber. However, the 3σ hard X-ray detection of the source with the BeppoSAX PDS suggested a reflection-dominated, Compton-thick view. The high-energy detection was later found to be possibly contaminated by another Type 2 AGN, NGC 2785, which is only 17 arcmin away. Our new Suzaku observation offers simultaneous soft and hard X-ray coverage and excludes contamination from NGC 2785. We find that the hard X-ray component is not detected by the Suzaku Hard X-ray Detector/PIN (effective energy band 14-45 keV). Both reflection and transmission models have been tested on the latest Suzaku and Chandra data. The 0.5-10 keV spectrum can be well modelled by the two scenarios. In addition, our analysis implied that the absorption column required in both models is N_H ∼ 5 × 10²³ cm^-2. Unless IRAS 09104+4109 is a `changing-look' quasar, we confirm that it is a Compton-thin AGN. Although the lack of detection of X-ray emission above 10 keV seems to favour the transmission scenario, we found that the two models offer fairly similar flux predictions over the X-ray band below ∼40 keV. We also found that the strong iron line shown in the Suzaku spectrum is in fact a blend of two emission lines, in which the 6.4 keV one is mostly contributed from the AGN and the 6.7 keV from the hot cluster gas. This implies that the neutral line is perhaps caused by disc reflection, and the reflection-dominated model is more likely the explanation. The transmission model should not be completely ruled out, but a deeper hard X-ray spectrum observation is needed to discriminate between the two scenarios.