Spectral Study of the Heavily Obscured Active Galactic Nucleus in Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 3982

Heavily obscured active galactic nuclei (AGN) offer a unique opportunity to study the circum-nuclear environment in accreting supermassive black holes. The advent of NuSTAR has ushered in a new era for studying such systems by providing sensitive spectra > 10 keV. The observed spectral shape in this hard band is crucial for understanding the geometry of the obscurer, as well as for estimating the intrinsic accretion power. In this poster, I am presenting my work on the Compton-thick Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 3982 with XMM-Newton and NuSTAR. I fit several different physically-motivated obscurer models to the broadband X-ray spectra of the source. Each model represents a different circum-nuclear obscurer geometry and I also compare with empirical models of semi-infinite reflecting slabs. By using the Bayesian X-ray Analysis (BXA) platform, the full pre-defined parameter space of each model is explored to remove issues with local minima and reproduce parameter degeneracies precisely. By simulating HEX-P spectra from the best-fit for NGC 3982 (100 ks per detector) with varying covering factors, I illustrate the future potential for sensitive studies of the obscurer geometry amongst the low-luminosity AGN population.