Compton Thick AGN in the XMM-COSMOS survey

Understand

Heavily obscured, Compton Thick (CT, NH>10^24 cm^-2) AGN may represent an important phase in AGN/galaxy co-evolution and are expected to provide a significant contribution to the cosmic X-ray background (CXB).

• Through direct X-ray spectra analysis, we selected 39 heavily obscured AGN (NH>3x10^23 cm^-2) in the 2 deg^2 XMM-COSMOS survey.
• After selecting CT AGN based on the fit of a simple absorbed two power law model to the XMM data, the presence of CT AGN was confirmed in 80% of the sources using deeper Chandra data and more complex models.
• The final sample of CT AGN comprises 10 sources spanning a large range of redshift and luminosity.