Hot dust in two hard Chandra X-ray sources

Abstract

The two brightest hard X-ray sources discovered serendipitously by Chandra in the field of the lensing cluster A2390 are found to have ISOCAM counterparts at 6.7 and 15μm. We use this fact, together with their non-detection by SCUBA at 850μm, as the basis for dusty radiative transfer modelling of their infrared spectral energy distributions. For the best-fitting models, we find that the dust that reprocesses the optical-ultraviolet light in these Compton-thin active galactic nuclei (AGN) is heated to near its sublimation temperature (above 1000K), with an inner radius within a parsec of the nucleus. Some warm-dust models with inner temperatures of 200K are also formally acceptable. These findings strongly support the obscured AGN hypothesis for the new hard X-ray Chandra sources, which lack both strong emission lines and 850-μm SCUBA detections.