Bibcode
Ramos-Almeida, C.; Asensio-Ramos, A.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 428, Issue 1, p.195-204
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1
2013
Citations
11
Refereed citations
11
Description
Recent success in explaining several properties of the dusty torus
around the central engine of active galactic nuclei has been gathered
with the assumption of clumpiness. The properties of such clumpy dusty
tori can be inferred by analysing spectral energy distributions (SEDs),
sometimes with scarce sampling given that large aperture telescopes and
long integration times are needed to get good spatial resolution and
signal. We aim at using the information already present in the data and
the assumption of clumpy dusty torus, in particular, the CLUMPY models
of Nenkova et al., to evaluate the optimum next observation such that we
maximize the constraining power of the new observed photometric point.
To this end, we use the existing and barely applied idea of Bayesian
adaptive exploration, a mixture of Bayesian inference, prediction and
decision theories. The result is that the new photometric filter we use
is the one that maximizes the expected utility, which we approximate
with the entropy of the predictive distribution. In other words, we have
to sample where there is larger variability in the SEDs compatible with
the data with what we know of the model parameters. We show that
Bayesian adaptive exploration can be used to suggest new observations,
and ultimately optimal filter sets, to better constrain the parameters
of the clumpy dusty torus models. In general, we find that the region
between 10 and 200 μm produces the largest increase in the expected
utility, although sub-mm data from Atacama Large Millimeter Array also
prove to be useful. It is important to note that here we are not
considering the angular resolution of the data, which is key when
constraining torus parameters. Therefore, the expected utilities derived
from this methodology must be weighted with the spatial resolution of
the data.
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