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Richard Mushotzy

Publications and source records attributed to Richard Mushotzy.

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BASS. XLIII: Optical, UV, and X-ray emission properties of unobscured Swift/BAT active galactic nuclei

We present one of the largest multiwavelength studies of simultaneous optical-to-X-ray spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of unobscured active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the local Universe. Using a representative sample of hard-X-ray-selected AGN from the 70-month Swift/BAT catalog, with optical/UV photometric data from Swift/UVOT and X-ray spectral data from Swift/XRT, we constructed broadband SEDs of 236 nearby AGN (0.001<z<0.3). We employed GALFIT to estimate host galaxy contamination in the optical/UV and determine the intrinsic AGN fluxes. We used an absorbed power law with a reflection component to model the X-ray spectra and a dust-reddened multi-temperature blackbody to fit the optical/UV SED. We calculated total bolometric luminosities ($L_{bol}$), optical-to-X-ray spectral indices ($α_{ox}$), and multiple bolometric corrections (BCs) in the optical, UV, and X-rays. We used black hole masses obtained by reverberation mapping and the virial method to estimate Eddington ratios ($λ_{Edd}$) for all our AGN. We confirm the tight correlation between UV and X-ray luminosity for our sample. We observe a significant decrease in $α_{ox}$ with $L_{bol}$ and $λ_{Edd}$, suggesting that brighter sources emit more UV photons per X-rays. We report a second-order regression relation between the 2-10 keV BC and $α_{ox}$, which is useful to compute $L_{bol}$ in the absence of multiband SEDs. We also investigate the dependence of optical/UV BCs on the physical properties of AGN and obtain a significant increase in the UV BCs with $L_{bol}$ and $λ_{Edd}$, unlike those in the optical, which are constant across five orders of $L_{bol}$ and $λ_{Edd}$. We obtain significant dispersions (~0.1-1 dex) in all BCs, and hence recommend using appropriate relations with observed quantities while including the reported scatter, instead of their median values.

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