Compton-thick AGN in the NuSTAR era IV: A deep NuSTAR and XMM-Newton view of the candidate Compton thick AGN in ESO 116-G018

Abstract

We present the 2--78 keV spectral analysis of the deep NuSTAR and XMM-Newton observation of a nearby Seyfert 2 galaxy, ESO 116-G018, which is selected as a candidate Compton-thick (CT-) active galactic nucleus (AGN) based on a previous Chandra-Swift/BAT study. Through our analysis, the source is for the first time confirmed to be a CT-AGN at a $>$3 $\sigma$ confidence level, with the 'line-of-sight' column density N$_{\rm H,Z}$ = [2.46-2.76] $\times$ $10^{24}$ cm$^{-2}$. The 'global average' column density of the obscuring torus is N$_{\rm H,S}$ = [0.46-0.62] $\times$ $10^{24}$ cm$^{-2}$, which suggests a clumpy, rather than uniform, distribution of the obscuring material surrounding the accreting supermassive black hole. The excellent-quality data given by the combined NuSTAR and XMM-Newton observations enable us to produce a strong constraint on the covering factor of the torus of ESO 116-G018, which is found to be $f_c$ = [0.13-0.15]. We also estimate the bolometric luminosity from the broad-band X-ray spectrum, being L$\rm _{bol}$ = [2.57-3.41] $\times$ 10$^{44}$ erg s$^{-1}$.