The lively accretion disk in NGC 2992. II: the 2019/2021 X-ray monitoring campaigns

We report on the short and long term X-ray properties of the bright nearby Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 2992, which was extensively observed with Swift, XMM-Newton and NuSTAR. Swift targeted the source more than 100 times between 2019 and 2021 in the context of two monitoring campaigns. Both time-averaged and time-resolved analyses are performed, and we find that the short-to-long term spectral properties of NGC 2992 are dominated by a highly variable nuclear continuum. The source varied in the 2-10 keV energy band from 0.6 to 12 $ imes$ 10$^{-11}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ during the two year long Swift monitoring. The fastest 2-10 keV flux change (by a factor of $sim60%$) occurred on a timescale of a few hours. The overall emission spectrum of the source is consistent with a power law-like continuum ($Gamma=1.69pm0.01$) absorbed by a constant line-of-sight column density N$_{H}=(7.8pm0.1) imes$ 10$^{21}$ $ m cm^{-2}$. The reflected emission is likely due to matter with an average column density N$_{ m H}=(9.6pm2.7) imes$ 10$^{22}$ $ m cm^{-2}$, thus NGC 2992 appears to have a globally Compton-thin circumnuclear medium. This scenario is fully supported by an independent analysis of the fractional variability and by XMM-Newton multi-year spectra.