Broad Hα and Hβ emission lines (FWHM > 1,000 km s−1) are incredibly efficient tracers of the high-velocity clouds encircling Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). As a result, we search for these broad line AGN in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) catalog. We identify 301 broad-line Hα galaxies and 801 broad-line Hβ galaxies in the catalog. In total, we detect 1,042 unique broad-line galaxies with luminosities between 1037 - 1043 erg s−1; 60 feature both broad Hα and broad Hβ emission. We also determine that the broad line region radius ranges between 0.01 - 46 light days, with a median radius of 0.1 light days (0.02 pc) for our broad Hβ sample. In addition, we find that both samples feature a higher fraction of galaxy mergers (44% for the broad Hα sample and 43% for the broad Hβ sample), compared to the full MaNGA galaxy sample (26%), which suggests that merger-driven fueling is strongly active in our sample.
@article{arxiv.2405.12873,
title = {A Catalog of Broad H{\alpha} and H{\beta} Active Galactic Nuclei in MaNGA},
author = {James Negus and Julia M. Comerford and Francisco Müller Sánchez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12873},
year = {2024}
}