There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Observations of the Seyfert 2 and starburst galaxy NGC 5135 with the Chandra X-ray
Observatory demonstrate that both of these phenomena contribute significantly to its
X-ray emission. We spatially isolate the active galactic nucleus (AGN) and demonstrate
that it is entirely obscured by column density N_H > 10^{24} cm^{-2}, detectable in
the Chandra bandpass only as a strongly reprocessed, weak continuum and a prominent
iron K alpha emission line with equivalent width of 2.4 keV. Most of the soft X-ray
emission, both near the AGN and extending over several-kpc spatial scales, is collisionally-excited
plasma. We attribute this thermal emission to stellar processes. The AGN dominates
the X-ray emission only at energies above 4 keV. In the spectral energy distribution
that extends to far-infrared wavelengths, nearly all of the emergent luminosity below
10 keV is attributable to star formation, not the AGN.