The environment of active objects in the nearby universe
Abstract
We study the galaxy environment of active galaxies, radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars in the redshift range . We use APM galaxies in order to explore the local galaxy overdensity and the colour distribution of neighbouring galaxies of these target samples. For comparison, we perform similar analysis on samples of Abell clusters with X-ray emission, and samples of Abell clusters with richness R=1 and R=0. The projected cross-correlations show that the samples of quasars and active galaxies reside in regions of galaxy density enhancements lower than those typical of R=0 clusters. We also find that in the nearby universe the local galaxy overdensity of radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars are comparable. The analysis of the distribution of galaxy colour indexes suggests that the environment of quasars is not strongly dominated by a population of red galaxies, characteristic of rich Abell cluster, an effect that is more clearly appreciated for our sample of radio-loud quasars.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0205409,
title = {The environment of active objects in the nearby universe},
author = {Georgina V. Coldwell and Hector J. Martinez and Diego G. Lambas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0205409},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in MNRAS