Compton-thick AGN in the NuSTAR Era. IV. A deep NuSTAR and XMM-Newton view of the candidate compton-thick AGN in ESO 116-G018

We present a 2-78 keV spectral analysis of the deep NuSTAR and XMM-Newton observation of a nearby Seyfert 2 galaxy, ESO 116-G018, which is selected as a candidate Compton-thick (CT) active galactic nucleus (AGN) based on a previous Chandra-Swift-BAT study. Through our analysis, the source is, for the first time, confirmed to be a CT AGN at a >3 sigma confidence level, with the "line-of-sight" column density N-H,N-Z = [2.46-2.76] x 10(24) cm(-2). The "global average" column density of the obscuring torus is N-H,N-S = [0.46-0.62] x 10(24) cm(-2), which suggests a clumpy, rather than uniform, distribution of the obscuring material surrounding the accreting supermassive black hole. The excellent-quality data given by the combined NuSTAR and XMM-Newton observations enable us to produce a strong constraint on the covering factor of the torus of ESO 116-G018, which is found to be f(c) = [0.13-0.15]. We also estimate the bolometric luminosity from the broadband X-ray spectrum to be L-bol = [2.57-3.41] x 10(44) erg s(-1).