Hickox & Alexander (2018) ARA&A

Our upcoming review article, Hickox & Alexander 2018, “Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei”, to appear in Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 56, is now available on the arXiv.

This page displays an animated adaptation of Figure 4 from the review, which is a schematic of the spectral energy distribution (SED) and multiwavelength images of an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and its host galaxy, for changing values of the contribution of the AGN to the total emission of the galaxy (defined at 1 micron as f_AGN) and the obscuring column density N_H. You are free (and encouraged) to use this animation in talks or presentations, with appropriate attribution.

You can download the video at the links below (if it doesn’t open immediately, you can right-click to download).

• mp4 format (1.6 MB)
• mov format (1.4 MB, slightly lower resolution)

The animation is also available on YouTube:

Figure Caption: Schematic demonstrations of the multi-wavelength observational signatures of an AGN as a function of nuclear obscuration (increasing from bottom to top) and the relative luminosity of the AGN to the host galaxy (increasing from left to right). The nuclear obscuration is parameterised by NH and the relative luminosity of the AGN to the host galaxy is based on the fraction of the intrinsic emission from the AGN at 1 μm (fAGN). The bottom component shows the overall model SED, indicating the emission from the host galaxy and the AGN (red, blue, and cyan: AGN torus, disk, and X-ray components; gray: host-galaxy component; black: combination of AGN and host galaxy). IR and optical spectral components are taken from Harrison (2014) and Assef et al. (2010), optical AGN lines from Vanden Berk et al. (2001), and X-ray spectra from Revnivtsev et al. (2008) and Balokovic et al. (2018). The images on top indicate the broad features predicted to be observed in imaging data in the mid-IR, optical, and X-ray bands on the basis of the model SED, based on images of the galaxy M104 and quasar 3C 273 (images courtesy NASA).