English

Probing dynamics and thermal properties inside molecular tori with CO rovibrational absorption lines

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2022-07-27 v1

Abstract

A recent hydrodynamic model, "radiation-driven fountain model" (Wada et al. 2016), presented a dynamical picture that active galactic nuclei (AGNs) tori sustain their geometrical thickness by gas circulation around AGNs, and previous papers confirmed that this picture is consistent with multi-wavelength observations of nearby Seyfert galaxies. Recent near-infrared observations implied that CO rovibrational absorption lines (ΔJ=±1\Delta J=\pm1, v=01v=0-1, λ4.7\lambda \sim 4.7 μm\mathrm{\mu m}) could probe physical properties of the inside tori. However, the origin of the CO absorption lines has been under debate. In this paper, we investigate the origin of the absorption lines and conditions for detecting them by performing line radiative transfer calculations based on the radiation-driven fountain model. We find that CO rovibrational absorption lines are detected at inclination angles θobs=5080\theta_\mathrm{obs} = 50-80 ^{\circ}. At the inclination angle θobs=77\theta_\mathrm{obs} = 77 ^{\circ}, we observe multi-velocity components: inflow (vLOS=30v_\mathrm{LOS}=30 kms1\mathrm{kms^{-1}}), systemic (vLOS=0kms1v_\mathrm{LOS}=0 \, \mathrm{kms^{-1}}), and outflows (vLOS=75,95,v_\mathrm{LOS}=-75,\, -95, and 105-105 kms1\mathrm{kms^{-1}}). The inflow and outflow components (vLOS=30v_\mathrm{LOS}= 30 and 95-95 kms1\mathrm{kms^{-1}}) are collisionally excited at the excitation temperature of 186186 and 380380 K up to J=12J=12 and 44, respectively. The inflow and outflow components originate from the accreting gas on the equatorial plane at 1.51.5 pc from the AGN center and the outflowing gas driven by AGN radiation pressure at 1.01.0 pc, respectively. These results suggest that CO rovibrational absorption lines can provide us with the velocities and kinetic temperatures of the inflow and outflow in the inner a-few-pc regions of AGN tori, and the observations can probe the gas circulation inside the tori.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.00688,
  title  = {Probing dynamics and thermal properties inside molecular tori with CO rovibrational absorption lines},
  author = {Kosei Matsumoto and Takao Nakagawa and Keiichi Wada and Shunsuke Baba and Shusuke Onishi and Taisei Uzuo and Naoki Isobe and Yuki Kudoh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.00688},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

19 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables, accepted by The Astrophysical Journal