Establishing the AGN torus inner boundary with a first direct access to the central engine in the near-IR

Details Establishing the AGN torus inner boundary with a first direct access to the central engine in the near-IR Establishing the AGN torus inner boundary with a first direct access to the central engine in the near-IR

Feb 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008noao.prop..184k&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2008A-0184

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Contrary to the expectation that near-IR long-baseline interferometry can spatially resolve the innermost dusty torus in Type 1 AGN, the only existing such measurement, with the Keck Interferometer (KI) by Swain et al. (2003) for the brightest Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 4151, has indicated an unexpectedly compact size (radius <=0.5 mas or 0.04 pc; V^2=0.84+/-0.06 at K-band), much smaller than the nominal dust sublimation radius. This has been interpreted as a dominance of an unresolved accretion disk, implying non-existence of the putative torus in this prototypical Type 1 nucleus. However, we recently pointed out that the inner torus radii suggested by near-IR reverberations are generally also much smaller, by a factor of 3, than the nominal sublimation radius. Now with the significantly improved KI, we propose to conduct an independent and conclusive size measurement by obtaining K- band visibilities over a significant range of baselines. This will restore the torus picture, with a much smaller radius than expected from nominal ISM grains, and establish a significantly different nature of the grains in the innermost AGN. Furthermore, with a new H-band visibility measurement, we will be able to have a first direct access to the unresolved accretion disk in the near-IR.

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