Radiative pressure feedback in obscured quasars

Ricci et al. (2017, Nature, 549, 488) discovered a lack of high accretion rate, obscured Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the hard X-ray selected Swift/BAT local AGN survey. This was interpreted as radiative pressure driven AGN feedback clearing its immediate vicinity composed of dusty gas (having an effectively low Eddington limit in the order of 0.01-0.1), and governing the level of nuclear obscuration. As we find Eddington-limited accretion and high extinction values among obscured, luminous AGN (quasars) however, it may be that the local X-ray AGN and the distant quasars undergo different feedback mechanisms in clearing their surroundings. In this study, we simply compare the obscuring column density and Eddington ratio values for quasars selected by various methods, including X-ray obscured, optically blue, infrared red/luminous, and submillimeter bright AGN. We find obscured quasars lying on the column density-Eddington ratio diagram previously unoccupied by Ricci et al., suggesting that radiative pressure is insufficient to clear its dusty structure at high luminosity, or that the dust in obscured quasars are more extended than the low luminosity counterparts to become fully transparent. We discuss alternative feedback scenarios that may be more relevant for obscured quasars.