Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Nov 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009sf2a.conf..151g&link_type=abstract
SF2A-2009: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics, held 29 June - 4 July 2009 in
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Accreting supermassive black holes reside in a very complex environment and the inner structure and dynamics of active galactic nuclei (AGN) are not well understood yet. In this note, I point out the important role that multi-wavelength polarimetry can play in understanding AGN. In addition to spectroscopy, the measurement of the polarization percentage and position angle provides two more observables that are sensitive to the geometry and kinematics of emission and scattering regions. Furthermore, time-dependent polarimetry allows to measure spatial distances between emission regions and scattering mirrors by applying a reverberation technique. For radiation coming from the direct vicinity of the black hole, the polarization also contains information about the space-time metric. Spectropolarimetry observations of AGN are obtained in the radio, the infrared, the optical, and the ultraviolet wave bands and in the future they are going be available also in the X-ray range. To interpret these observations in a coherent way, it is necessary to study models that do not only reproduce the broad-band spectroscopy properties of AGN but also their multi-wavelength polarization signature. I present a first step towards such models for the case of radio-quiet AGN. The modeling reveals the optical/UV and X-ray polarization properties of the reprocessed radiation coming from the obscuring torus. The discussion about the implications of such models includes prospects for the up-coming technique of X-ray (spectro-)polarimetry.
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