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Towards a new paradigm of dust structure in AGN: Dissecting the mid-IR emission of Circinus galaxy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2021

Marko Stalevski ,
Daniel Asmus  and
Konrad R. W. Tristram
Marko Stalevski
Affiliation:
Astronomical Observatory, Volgina 7, 11060 Belgrade, Serbia email: [email protected]
Daniel Asmus
Affiliation:
Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, SouthamptonUnited Kingdom
Konrad R. W. Tristram
Affiliation:
European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile
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Abstract

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Recent mid-infrared (MIR) observations of nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN), revealed that their dust emission appears prominently extended in the polar direction, at odds with the expectations from the canonical dusty torus. This polar dust, tentatively associated with dusty winds driven by radiation pressure, is found to have a major contribution to the MIR flux from a few to hundreds of parsecs. One such source with a clear detection of polar dust is a nearby, well-known AGN in the Circinus galaxy. We proposed a phenomenological model consisting of a compact, thin dusty disk and a large-scale polar outflow in the form of a hyperboloid shell and demonstrated that such a model is able to explain the peculiar MIR morphology on large scales seen by VLT/VISIR and the interferometric data from VLTI/MIDI that probe the small scales. Our results call for caution when attributing dust emission of unresolved sources entirely to the torus and warrant further investigation of the MIR emission in the polar regions of AGN.

Keywords

galaxies: individual (Circinus)galaxies: activegalaxies: nucleigalaxies: Seyfertinfrared: galaxiesradiative transferradiation mechanisms: thermal
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 15 , Symposium S356: Nuclear Activity in Galaxies Across Cosmic Time , October 2019 , pp. 50 - 55
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Astronomical Union

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