Resolving the Hot Dust Disk of ESO323-G77

Abstract

Infrared interferometry has fuelled a paradigm shift in our understanding of the dusty structure in the central parsecs of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). The dust is now thought to comprise of a hot ($\sim 1000$K) equatorial disk, some of which is blown into a cooler ($\sim 300$K) polar dusty wind by radiation pressure. In this paper, we utilise the new near-IR interferometer GRAVITY on the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) to study a Type 1.2 AGN hosted in the nearby Seyfert galaxy ESO323-G77. By modelling the squared visibility and closure phase, we find that the hot dust is equatorially extended, consistent with the idea of a disk, and shows signs of asymmetry in the same direction. Furthermore, the data is fully consistent with the hot dust size determined by K band reverberation mapping as well as the predicted size from a CAT3D-WIND model created in previous work using the SED of ESO323-G77 and observations in the mid-IR from VLTI/MIDI.

arXiv comment12 pages, 11 figures, and 5 tables in main text. Accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Thermal imaging of dust hiding the black hole in the Active Galaxy NGC 1068
• VLTI/GRAVITY Interferometric Measurements of Innermost Dust Structure Sizes around AGNs
• The dust sublimation region of the Type 1 AGN NGC4151 at a hundred micro-arcsecond scale as resolved by the CHARA Array interferometer
• Broad-line region in active galactic nuclei: Dusty or dustless?
• The NuSTAR view of the changing look AGN ESO 323-G77
• Direct imaging of AGN outflows and their origin with the 23 m Large Binocular Telescope
• Chromatically modelling the parsec scale dusty structure in the centre of NGC1068
• Coronal Line Forest AGN -- II. Analysis of the spectral energy distribution
• Ensemble Mapping the Inner Structure of Luminous Quasars
• VLTI-GRAVITY observations of blazars
• NIRDust: Probing Hot Dust Emission Around Type 2 AGN Using K-band Spectra