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The early stage of a cosmic collision? XMM-Newton unveils two obscured AGN in the galaxy pair ESO509-IG066

M. Guainazzi, E. Piconcelli, E. Jimenez-Bailon, G. Matt

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0411435

Abstract

We report the XMM-Newton discovery of a X-ray bright AGN pair in the interacting galaxy system ESO509-IG066. Both galaxies host an X-ray luminous (LX ~1043 erg/s) obscured nucleus with column densities NH~7x1022 and NH~5x1021 atoms/cm/cm. The optical morphology is only mildly disturbed, suggesting a merging system in the early stage of its evolution. Still, the pair is probably gravitationally bound, and might eventually evolve into a compact, fully gas embedded systems such as NGC6240.

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