How Saturated Are Absorption Lines in the Broad Absorption Line Quasar PG 1411+442?
Recently, convincing evidence was found for extremely large X-ray absorption by column densities greater than 1023 cm-2 in broad absorption line quasars. One consequence of this is that any soft X-ray emission from these QSOs would be the scattered light or leaked light from partially covering absorbing material. A detection of the unabsorbed soft X-ray and absorbed hard X-ray component will allow us to determine the total column density as well as the effective covering factor of the absorbing material, which are difficult to obtain from the UV absorption lines. Brinkmann et al. recently showed that both the unabsorbed and absorbed components are detected in the nearby very bright broad absorption line quasar PG 1411+442. In this Letter, we make a further analysis of the broadband X-ray spectrum and the UV spectrum from the Hubble Space Telescope and demonstrate that broad absorption lines are completely saturated at the bottom of absorption troughs.
