English

A Catalog of Broad H{\alpha} and H{\beta} Active Galactic Nuclei in MaNGA

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-06-13 v3

Abstract

Broad Hα\alpha and Hβ\beta emission lines (FWHM > 1,000 km s1^{-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\alpha galaxies and 801 broad-line Hβ\beta galaxies in the catalog. In total, we detect 1,042 unique broad-line galaxies with luminosities between 1037^{37} - 1043^{43} erg s1^{-1}; 60 feature both broad Hα\alpha and broad Hβ\beta 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\beta sample. In addition, we find that both samples feature a higher fraction of galaxy mergers (44% for the broad Hα\alpha sample and 43% for the broad Hβ\beta sample), compared to the full MaNGA galaxy sample (26%), which suggests that merger-driven fueling is strongly active in our sample.

Keywords

Cite

@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}
}

Comments

15 pages, 7 figures