NuSTAR unveils a heavily obscured low-luminosity active galactic nucleus in the luminous infrared galaxy NGC 6286
- Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 306, Santiago 22 (Chile)
- Universidad de Concepción, Departamento de Astronomía, Casilla 160-C, Concepción (Chile)
- Instituto de Física y Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Valparaíso, Gran Bretana N 1111, Playa Ancha, Valparaíso (Chile)
- ICREA and Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona, IEEC-UB, Martí i Franquès, 1, E-08028 Barcelona (Spain)
- Institute for Astronomy, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
- Institute for Astronomy, Department of Physics, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, CH-8093 Zurich (Switzerland)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
We report the detection of a heavily obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN) in the luminous infrared galaxy (LIRG) NGC 6286 identified in a 17.5 ks Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array observation. The source is in an early merging stage and was targeted as part of our ongoing NuSTAR campaign observing local luminous and ultra-luminous infrared galaxies in different merger stages. NGC 6286 is clearly detected above 10 keV and by including the quasi-simultaneous Swift/XRT and archival XMM-Newton and Chandra data, we find that the source is heavily obscured (N{sub H} ≃(0.95−1.32) × 10{sup 24} cm{sup −2}) with a column density consistent with being Compton-thick (CT, log(N{sub H}/cm{sup −2})⩾24). The AGN in NGC 6286 has a low absorption-corrected luminosity (L{sub 2−10 keV} ∼ 3−20 × 10{sup 41} erg s{sup −1}) and contributes ≲1% to the energetics of the system. Because of its low luminosity, previous observations carried out in the soft X-ray band (<10 keV) and in the infrared did not notice the presence of a buried AGN. NGC 6286 has multiwavelength characteristics typical of objects with the same infrared luminosity and in the same merger stage, which might imply that there is a significant population of obscured low-luminosity AGNs in LIRGs that can only be detected by sensitive hard X-ray observations.
- OSTI ID:
- 22886993
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 819, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); Since 2009, the country of publication for this journal is the UK.; ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Language:
- English
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