Testing Forward Modeling Analysis with Swift/BAT AGN

Many objects seen by X-ray telescopes have very few photons. While a common approach is stacking to obtain an average measure of their properties, this technique does not work well when the sources are potentially heterogeneous. A relatively new approach is to use forward modeling to constrain the model parameters yielding mock observations consistent with the data. Our project sought to test the reliability of the parameters determined in this way. Specifically, we used this methodology to determine the parameters of 69 local Swift/BAT AGN using their XRT observations and compared the results to their known intrinsic luminosities and obscurations. We will present the results of this comparison and their implications for the reliability of forward-modeling to determine AGN parameters in low-count X-ray observations. This work was supported by NASA grant No. 80NSSC20K0050.