Dust reverberation mapping of type 2 AGN NGC 2110 realized with X-ray and 3–5 μm IR monitoring

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dust reverberation mapping is one of powerful methods to investigate the structure of the dusty tori in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and it has been performed on more than a hundred type 1 AGNs. However, no clear results have been reported on type 2 AGNs because their strong optical/UV extinction completely hides their accretion disc emission. Here, we focus on an X-ray-bright type 2 AGN, NGC 2110, and utilize 2–20 keV X-ray variation monitored by MAXI to trace disc emission, instead of optical/UV variation. Comparing it with light curves in the WISE infrared (IR) W1 band ($\lambda =3.4~\mu$m) and W2 band ($\lambda =4.6~\mu$m) with cross-correlation analyses, we found candidates of the dust reverberation time lag at ∼60, ∼130, and ∼1250 d between the X-ray flux variation and those of the IR bands. By examining the best-fitting X-ray and IR light curves with the derived time lags, we found that the time lag of ∼130 d is most favoured. With this time lag, the relation between the time lag and luminosity of NGC 2110 is consistent with those in type 1 AGNs, suggesting that the dust reverberation in NGC 2110 mainly originates in hot dust in the torus innermost region, the same as in type 1 AGNs. As demonstrated by the present study, X-ray and IR simultaneous monitoring can be a promising tool to perform the dust reverberation mapping on type 2 AGNs.