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Session 50 - Active Galaxies.
Display session, Tuesday, January 16
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
A new sample of 67 soft X-ray selected Seyferts is chosen from the catalog of the Einstein Slew Survey (Elvis et al. 1992, Plummer et al. 1994). We use axial ratio distributions to probe the geometry and column depth of obscuring material in the plane of the AGN galaxy disks. Visible images of X-ray bright AGN are drawn from the new Digitized Sky Survey and from CCD images, and elliptical isophote fitting is used to determine an axial ratio for the AGN hosts. We find a strong bias against edge on hosts (only 14% with b/a<0.5), which implies a thick distribution of obscuring material in the galaxy plane of N_H\sim1.5\times10^23 cm^-2. This material could prevent our detection of half of all AGN in the sky at wavelengths where the material is opaque.
