Evidence for Quasar Activity Triggered by Galaxy Mergers in HST Observations of Dust-reddened Quasars

By T. Urrutia, M. Lacy, Robert H. Becker. 2007

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present Hubble Space Telescope ACS images of 13 dust-reddened type 1 quasars selected from the FIRST/2MASS Red Quasar Survey. These quasars have high intrinsic luminosities after correction for dust obscuration (–23.5 ⩾ MB ⩾ − 26.2 from K-magnitude). The images show strong evidence of recent or ongoing interaction in 11 of the 13 cases, even before the quasar nucleus is subtracted. None of the host galaxies are well fit by a simple elliptical profile. The fraction of quasars showing interaction is significantly higher than the 30% seen in samples of host galaxies of normal, unobscured quasars. There is a weak correlation between the amount of dust reddening and the magnitude of interaction in the host galaxy, measured using the Gini coefficient and the concentration index. Although few host galaxy studies of normal quasars are matched to ours in intrinsic quasar luminosity, no evidence has been found for a strong dependence of merger activity on host luminosity in samples of the host galaxies of normal quasars. We thus believe that the high merger fraction in our sample is related to their obscured nature, with a significant amount of reddening occurring in the host galaxy. The red quasar phenomenon seems to have an evolutionary explanation, with the young quasar spending the early part of its lifetime enshrouded in an interacting galaxy. This might be further indication of a link between AGNs and starburst galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ebbe193fe2b3adc168fce5107469578f65ca941

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

THE CHANDRA COSMOS SURVEY. III. OPTICAL AND INFRARED IDENTIFICATION OF X-RAY POINT SOURCES (2012, result): “…on average blue color (〈R − K〉 =3.27) in the optical and soft spectra in the X-ray (〈HR〉 =-0.29, including upper limits), even if a tail at higher HR andR− K is present, in agreement with other findings of red quasars with broad lines (Glikman et al. 2007, Urrutia et al. 2008, Young et al. 2009).”
Evidence for Merger Remnants in Early-Type Host Galaxies of Low-Redshift QSOs (2008, background): “There is an abundance of circumstantial evidence in the literature connecting QSO activity at low redshifts with mergers and interactions (e.g., Heckman et al. 1984; Hutchings et al. 1988; Canalizo & Stockton 2001; Urrutia et al. 2008).”
BLACK HOLE VARIABILITY AND THE STAR FORMATION–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS CONNECTION: DO ALL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES HOST AN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS? (2013, result): “Other results have suggested that fmerge increases at very high LAGN (e.g., Urrutia et al. 2008) leading to the conclusion that black hole growth can be triggered by major interactions, but only at the highest luminosities (Schawinski et al. 2012; Treister et al. 2012).”
THE BULK OF THE BLACK HOLE GROWTH SINCE z ∼ 1 OCCURS IN A SECULAR UNIVERSE: NO MAJOR MERGER–AGN CONNECTION (2010, background): “Many observational studies of luminous AGN found a high rate of merging signatures in their hosts and detected the presence of very close companions, which before HST could not be resolved (e.g., Bahcall et al. 1997; Canalizo & Stockton 2001; Zakamska et al. 2006; Urrutia et al. 2008).”
Growing supermassive black holes in the late stages of galaxy mergers are heavily obscured (2017, background): “…galaxies, which triggers accretion and heavy obscuration, along with strong starbursts, and is then followed by a phase in which feedback from the AGN removes the obscuring material and the source can be observed as a red quasar (e.g., Urrutia et al. 2008; Banerji et al. 2012; LaMassa et al. 2016).”
The mean star formation rate of X-ray selected active galaxies and its evolution from z~2.5: results from PEP-Herschel (2012, background): “Morphological studies of low-redshift star-forming QSOs also find frequent merger signatures (Canalizo & Stockton 2001; Urrutia et al. 2008; Veilleux et al. 2009).”
MAJOR GALAXY MERGERS ONLY TRIGGER THE MOST LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2012, background): “…these samples with AGN selected from the SDSS survey based on their narrow high-ionization emission lines (Kauffmann et al. 2003), as reported by Koss et al. (2010), and the high-luminosity optical and near-IR quasars studied by Bahcall et al. (1997) and Urrutia et al. (2008), respectively.”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – IX. Merger-induced AGN activity as traced by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (2014, background): “A number of studie have found evidence for mergers in luminous quasar hosts (e.g., Canalizo & Stockton 2001; Bennert et al. 2008; Urrutia et al. 2008; Foreman, Volonteri & Dotti 2009; Ramos Almeida et al. 2011; Bessiere et al. 2012; Urrutia et al. 2012), where the link to interactions is fairly…”
The quest for dual and binary supermassive black holes: A multi-messenger view (2019, background): “selection of AGN and mergers (Donley et al., 2007; Urrutia et al., 2008; Veilleux et al., 2009; Assef et al., 2013; Glikman et al., 2015; Fan et al., 2016; Goulding et al., 2018), highlighting the fact that a large number of objects are missed by optical classification because of heavy extinction an”
Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “%) in luminous LAGN > 10 46 erg s−1 dust reddened quasars (e.g., Urrutia et al. 2008; Glikman et al. 2012), consequently leading to the intriguing suggestion that merger fraction is dependent on AGN bolometric luminosity (Treister et al. 2012).”
A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. I. Galaxy Mergers and Quasar Activity (2007, background): “…poststarburst stellar populations (Guyon et al. 2006),much of the dust arising on scales of the galaxy (in turbulent motions, inflow, and outflow; Urrutia et al. 2008), and extremely high Eddington ratios indicative of a still active period—making them (as opposed to most fully obscured quasars)…”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “%) and, importantly, is found to be higher than comparably massive distant galaxies (e.g., Bahcall et al., 1997; Canalizo & Stockton, 2001; Dunlop et al., 2003; Guyon et al., 2006; Bennert et al., 2008; Urrutia et al., 2008).”
INSPIRALLING SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES: A NEW SIGNPOST FOR GALAXY MERGERS (2008, background): “More recently, Urrutia et al. (2008) found that 85% of dust-reddened quasars show evidence of merging in images of their host galaxies.”
Morphologies of z ∼ 0.7 AGN host galaxies in CANDELS: no trend of merger incidence with AGN luminosity (2014, background): “Urrutia et al. (2008) studied a sample of highly reddened quasars at z ∼ 1 with strong reddening and large incidence of outflows.”