English

A comprehensive and uniform sample of broad-line active galactic nuclei from the SDSS DR7

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2019-07-31 v2

Abstract

A new, complete sample of 14,584 broad-line AGNs at z<0.35z<0.35 is presented, which are uncovered homogeneously from the complete database of galaxies and quasars observed spectroscopically in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Seventh Data Release. The stellar continuum is properly removed for each spectrum with significant host absorption line features, and careful analyses of the emission-line spectra, particularly in the Hα\rm \alpha and Hβ\rm \beta wavebands, are carried out. The broad Balmer emission line, particularly, Hα\rm \alpha, is used to indicate the presence of an AGN. The broad Hα\rm \alpha lines have luminosities in a range of 1038.510^{38.5}-1044.310^{44.3} erg s1^{-1}, and line widths (FWHMs) of 500-34,000 km s1^{-1}. The virial black hole masses, estimated from the broad line measurements, span a range of 105.110^{5.1}-1010.310^{10.3} MM_\odot, and the Eddington ratios vary from 3.3-3.3 to 1.31.3 in logarithmic scale. Other quantities such as multi-wavelength photometric properties and flags denoting peculiar line profiles are also included in this catalog. We describe the construction of this catalog and briefly discuss its properties. The catalog is publicly available online. This homogeneously selected AGN catalog, along with the accurately measured spectral parameters, provide the most updated, largest AGN sample data, which will enable further comprehensive investigations of the properties of the AGN population in the low-redshift universe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.05597,
  title  = {A comprehensive and uniform sample of broad-line active galactic nuclei from the SDSS DR7},
  author = {He-Yang Liu and Wen-Juan Liu and Xiao-Bo Dong and Hongyan Zhou and Tinggui Wang and Honglin Lu and Weimin Yuan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05597},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

22 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables; accepted for publication in ApJS