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

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-1) obscured nucleus with column densities NH ≃ 7 × 1022 cm-2 and NH ≃ 5 × 1021 cm-2. 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 NGC 6240 (Komossa et al. 2003).