We review our knowledge of the most basic properties of the AGN obscuring region - its location, scale, symmetry, and mean covering factor - and discuss new evidence on the distribution of covering factors in a sample of ~9000 quasars with WISE, UKIDSS, and SDSS photometry. The obscuring regions of AGN may be in some ways more complex than we thought - multi-scale, not symmetric, chaotic - and in some ways simpler - with no dependence on luminosity, and a covering factor distribution that may be determined by the simplest of considerations - e.g. random misalignments.
@article{arxiv.1303.0219,
title = {The Distribution of AGN Covering Factors},
author = {Andy Lawrence and Isaac Roseboom and Jack Mayo and Martin Elvis and Yue Shen and Heng Hao and Sara Petty},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.0219},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the Torus Workshop 2012 held at the University of Texas at San Antonio, 5-7 December 2012. C. Packham, R. Mason, and A. Alonso-Herrero (eds.). 8 pages, 5 figures