A variable active galactic nucleus at $z=2.06$ triply-imaged by the galaxy cluster MACS J0035.4-2015
Abstract
We report the discovery of a triply imaged active galactic nucleus (AGN), lensed by the galaxy cluster MACS J0035.4-2015 (). The object is detected in Hubble Space Telescope imaging taken for the RELICS program. It appears to have a quasi-stellar nucleus consistent with a point-source, with a de-magnified radius of pc. The object is spectroscopically confirmed to be an AGN at showing broad rest-frame UV emission lines, and is detected in both X-ray observations with Chandra and in ALCS ALMA band 6 (1.2 mm) imaging. It has a relatively faint rest-frame UV luminosity for a quasar-like object, . The object adds to just a few quasars or other X-ray sources known to be multiply lensed by a galaxy cluster. Some diffuse emission from the host galaxy is faintly seen around the nucleus and there is a faint object nearby sharing the same multiple-imaging symmetry and geometric redshift, possibly an interacting galaxy or a star-forming knot in the host. We present an accompanying lens model, calculate the magnifications and time delays, and infer physical properties for the source. We find the rest-frame UV continuum and emission lines to be dominated by the AGN, and the optical emission to be dominated by the host galaxy of modest stellar mass . We also observe some variation in the AGN emission with time, which may suggest that the AGN used to be more active. This object adds a low-redshift counterpart to several relatively faint AGN recently uncovered at high redshifts with HST and JWST.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.00025,
title = {A variable active galactic nucleus at $z=2.06$ triply-imaged by the galaxy cluster MACS J0035.4-2015},
author = {Lukas J. Furtak and Ramesh Mainali and Adi Zitrin and Adèle Plat and Seiji Fujimoto and Megan Donahue and Erica J. Nelson and Franz E. Bauer and Ryosuke Uematsu and Gabriel B. Caminha and Felipe Andrade-Santos and Larry D. Bradley and Karina I. Caputi and Stéphane Charlot and Jacopo Chevallard and Dan Coe and Emma Curtis-Lake and Daniel Espada and Brenda L. Frye and Kirsten K. Knudsen and Anton M. Koekemoer and Kotaro Kohno and Vasily Kokorev and Nicolas Laporte and Minju M. Lee and Brian C. Lemaux and Georgios E. Magdis and Keren Sharon and Daniel P. Stark and Yuanyuan Su and Katherine A. Suess and Yoshihiro Ueda and Hideki Umehata and Alba Vidal-García and John F. Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.00025},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Published in MNRAS. Corrected miss-assignment of affiliations in the author list