AGN Dusty Tori. II. Observational Implications of Clumpiness
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clumpy torus models with N0 ~ 5–15 dusty clouds along radial equatorial rays successfully explain AGN infrared observations. The dust has standard Galactic composition, with individual cloud optical depth τV ~ 30–100 at visual. The models naturally explain the observed behavior of the 10 μm silicate feature, in particular the lack of deep absorption features in AGNs of any type, and can reproduce the weak emission feature tentatively detected in type 2 QSOs. The clouds' angular distribution must have a soft edge, e.g., Gaussian, and the radial distribution should decrease as 1/r or 1/r2. In line with recent interferometry, the ratio of the torus outer to inner radius can be as small as ~5-10. The models can produce nearly isotropic IR emission together with highly anisotropic obscuration, as required by observations. Clumpiness implies that the viewing angle determines an AGN classification only probabilistically; a source can display type 1 properties even from directions close to the equatorial plane. The fraction of obscured sources depends not only on the torus angular thickness but also on the cloud number N0, and this fraction's observed decrease with luminosity can be explained with a decrease of either parameter. X-ray obscuration, too, is probabilistic; resulting from both dusty and dust-free clouds, it might be dominated by the latter, giving rise to the observed QSOs that are X-ray obscured. Observations indicate that the torus and broad-line-emitting clouds form a seamless distribution, with the transition between the two caused by dust sublimation. Torus clouds may have been detected in the outflow component of H2O maser emission from two AGNs. Proper-motion measurements of outflow masers, especially in Circinus, are a promising method for probing the morphology and kinematics of torus clouds.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it