NuSTAR View of the Nearby Obscured AGN
Abstract
The first focusing hard X-ray telescope, NuSTAR, is about to take the studies of obscured AGN to a new level by enabling deep extragalactic surveys with unprecedented spatial resolution and two orders of magnitude higher sensitivity than any other instrument operating in the same bandpass. With its sensitivity at energies above 10 keV, NuSTAR enables us to directly probe the population of obscured AGN both locally and up to 2. In order to better understand the high-redshift counterparts, we are conducting a hard X-ray spectroscopic survey of nearby obscured AGN selected from the Swift/BAT catalog. This will ultimately provide the largest collection of high-quality hard X-ray spectra to date and enable studies of the unresolved geometry of the obscuring and reprocessing material in the local AGN population. In this talk I will present some of the first results from spectral modeling of Compton-thick AGN observed in this survey, the challenges they pose for the currently available spectral models, and the importance of the multi-wavelength approach in constraining the unresolved structure of obscured AGN. I will also briefly present a preliminary analysis of the survey sample, which is nearing completion at the end of 2014.
- Publication:
-
AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #14
- Pub Date:
- August 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014HEAD...1410606B