2008/06/03 by Maia Nenkova, M. M. Sirocky, Matthew M. Sirocky +3 · 26 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Formalism (music) #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Geometry #Optics #Physics #Radiation #Radiative transfer #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Torus #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/590482
To appear in ApJ September 20, 2008
arxiv created 2008/06/03 · openalex publication_date 2008/09/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2020/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
According to unified schemes of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), the central engine is surrounded by dusty, optically thick clouds in a toroidal structure. We have recently developed a formalism that for the first time takes proper account of the clumpy nature of the AGN torus. We now provide a detailed report of our findings in a two-paper series. Here we present our general formalism for radiative transfer in clumpy media and construct its building blocks for the AGN problem—the source functions of individual dusty clouds heated by the AGN radiation field. We show that a fundamental difference from smooth density distributions is that in a clumpy medium, a large range of dust temperatures coexist at the same distance from the radiation central source. This distinct property explains the low dust temperatures found close to the nucleus of NGC 1068 in 10 μ m interferometric observations. We find that, irrespective of the overall geometry, a clumpy dust distribution shows only moderate variation in its spectral energy distribution, and the 10 μ m absorption feature is never deep. Furthermore, the X-ray attenuating column density is widely scattered around the column density that characterizes the IR emission. All of these properties are characteristic of AGN observations. The assembly of clouds into AGN tori and comparison with observations are presented in the companion paper.