IR emission from AGNs

Unified schemes of active galactic nuclei (AGN) require an obscuring dusty torus around the central source, giving rise to type 1 line spectrum for pole-on viewing and type 2 characteristics in edge-on sources. Infrared radiation at its different wavelengths is the best probe of the dust distribution, whether the torus orientation is edge-on or pole-on. The observed IR is in broad agreement with the unified scheme but serious problems remained in all early modeling efforts. In spite of a general awareness that the dust must be concentrated in clouds, clumpiness remained the one major ingredient missing in those radiative transfer studies because of the inherent difficulties it presents. We have recently developed the formalism to handle dust clumpiness and our results indicate that its inclusion may resolve the difficulties encountered by the previous theoretical efforts. We show that these problems find a natural explanation if the dust is contained in \about
5–10 clouds along radial rays through the torus. The spectral energy distributions (SED) of both type 1 and type 2 sources are properly reproduced from different viewpoints of the same object if the optical depth of each cloud is \ga 40 at visual wavelengths and the clouds’ mean free path increases roughly in proportion to radial distance.