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Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) hosting disk water megamasers are well known to be obscured by large amounts of gas, likely due to the presence along the line of sight of an almost edge-on disky structure orbiting the supermassive black hole. Correcting for the high obscuration is crucial to infer parameters intrinsic to the source, like its luminosity. We present a broadband X-ray spectral analysis of a water megamaser AGN in an early merger (NGC 5765B), combining Chandra and NuSTAR data. NGC 5765B is highly Compton-thick and reflection-dominated, following the general trend among disk megamasers. Combining the exquisite black hole mass from masers with our X-ray spectroscopy, the Eddington ratio of the megamaser is estimated to be in the 2%–14% range, and its robustness is confirmed through SED fitting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The covering factor of Compton-thick (CT) obscuring material associated with the torus in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is at present best understood through the fraction of sources exhibiting CT absorption along the line of sight (NH > 1.5 × 1024 cm−2) in the X-ray band, which reveals the average covering factor. Determining this CT fraction is difficult, however, due to the extreme obscuration. With its spectral coverage at hard X-rays (>10 keV), Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is sensitive to the AGNs covering factor since Compton scattering of X-rays off optically thick material dominates at these energies. We present a spectral analysis of 10 AGNs observed with NuSTAR where the obscuring medium is optically thick to Compton scattering, so-called CT AGNs. We use the torus models of Brightman & Nandra that predict the X-ray spectrum from reprocessing in a torus and include the torus opening angle as a free parameter and aim to determine the covering factor of the CT gas in these sources individually. Across the sample we find mild to heavy CT columns, with NH measured from 1024 to 1026 cm−2, and a wide range of covering factors, where individual measurements range from 0.2 to 0.9. We find that the covering factor, fc, is a strongly decreasing function of the intrinsic 2–10 keV luminosity, LX, where fc = (−0.41 ± 0.13)log10(LX/erg s−1)+18.31 ± 5.33, across more than two orders of magnitude in LX (1041.5–1044 erg s−1). The covering factors measured here agree well with the obscured fraction as a function of LX as determined by studies of local AGNs with LX > 1042.5 erg s−1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]