Speaker
Description
Most active galactic nuclei are seen through thick circum-nuclear gas and dust. Also, these column densities vary on time scales of days to years, indicating that the obscurer is made from clumps. We present the first clumpy obscurer model that reproduces eclipse events and column density distributions. We developed a new, open-source Monte Carlo code, XARS, to X-ray illuminate arbitrary geometries, including warped disks, outflowing winds and clump arrangements, and produce high S/N X-ray spectra for XSPEC for these. Preliminary fits show good agreement with NuSTAR spectral observations of some nearby AGN. I will demonstrate how the eROSITA survey will be able to systematically monitor millions of AGN on year-time scales for occultation events, probing the granularity of the obscuring medium.
| Affiliation | MPE |
|---|---|
| Topic | Multi-messenger and transient astronomy |
