Compton-thick AGNs in the NuSTAR Era. V. Joint NuSTAR and XMM-Newton Spectral Analysis of Three “Soft-gamma” Candidate CT-AGNs in the Swift/BAT 100-month Catalog

Abstract

Abstract We present the joint NuSTAR and XMM-Newton spectral analysis in the 0.6–70 keV band of three candidate Compton-thick (CT-) active galactic nuclei (AGNs) selected in the 100-month Swift-BAT catalog. These objects were previously classified as CT-AGNs based on low-quality Swift-X-ray Telescope (XRT) and Swift-Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) data, and had soft photon indices (Γ > 2.2) that suggested a potential overestimation of the line-of-sight column density (N H,LOS). Thanks to the high-quality NuSTAR and XMM-Newton data we were able to determine that in all three objects the photon index was significantly overestimated, and two out of three sources are reclassified from CT to Compton thin, confirming a previously observed trend, i.e., that a significant fraction of BAT-selected, candidate CT-AGNs with poor soft X-ray data are reclassified as Compton thin when the NuSTAR data are added to the fit. Finally, thanks to both the good XMM-Newton spatial resolution and the high NuSTAR and XMM-Newton spectral quality, we found that the third object in our sample was associated to the wrong counterpart: the correct one, 2MASX J10331570+5252182, has redshift z = 0.14036, which makes it one of the very few candidate CT-AGNs in the 100 months BAT catalog detected at z > 0.1, and a rare CT quasar.