A SEARCH FOR BINARY ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI: DOUBLE-PEAKED [O iii] AGNs IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY
By K. Smith, G. Shields, E. Bonning, C. C. McMullen, D. Rosario, S. Salviander. 2009
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present active galactic nuclei (AGNs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) having double-peaked profiles of [O iii]λλ5007, 4959 and other narrow emission lines, motivated by the prospect of finding candidate binary AGNs. These objects were identified by means of a visual examination of 21,592 quasars at z < 0.7 in SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7). Of the spectra with adequate signal-to-noise, 148 spectra exhibit a double-peaked [O iii] profile. Of these, 86 are Type 1 AGNs and 62 are Type 2 AGNs. Only two give the appearance of possibly being optically resolved double AGNs in the SDSS images, but many show close companions or signs of recent interaction. Radio-detected quasars are three times more likely to exhibit a double-peaked [O iii] profile than quasars with no detected radio flux, suggesting a role for jet interactions in producing the double-peaked profiles. Of the 66 broad-line (Type 1) AGNs that are undetected in the FIRST survey, 0.9% show double-peaked [O iii] profiles. We discuss statistical tests of the nature of the double-peaked objects. Further study is needed to determine which of them are binary AGNs rather than disturbed narrow line regions, and how many additional binaries may remain undetected because of insufficient line-of-sight velocity splitting. Previous studies indicate that 0.1% of SDSS quasars are spatially resolved binaries, with typical spacings of ∼10–100 kpc. If a substantial fraction of the double-peaked objects are indeed binaries, then our results imply that binaries occur more frequently at smaller separations (<10 kpc). This suggests that simultaneous fueling of both black holes is more common as the binary orbit decays through these spacings.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d1e59e701a7d767d296cf52774be3ca0324afd0
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- FEEDBACK IN LUMINOUS OBSCURED QUASARS (2011, background): “…galaxies (i.e., two active galaxies with∼ kpc separations) as narrow-line objects with multiple velocity peaks in the [OIII ] line in SDSS spectra (e.g., Wang et al. 2009; Liu et al. 2010b; Smith et al. 2010), as well as from the DEEP2 redshift survey (Gerke et al. 2007; Comerford et al. 2009b).”
- What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “…recoil (e.g., Volonteri, 2007; Komossa et al., 2008; Colpi & Dotti, 2009; Dotti et al., 2009; Civano et al., 2010; Robinson et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2010; Rosario et al., 2011; Barrows et al., 2011); however, see Dotti & Ruszkowski (2010) and Shen et al. (2011) for alternative…”
- UNDERSTANDING DUAL ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS ACTIVATION IN THE NEARBY UNIVERSE (2012, methodology): “…physical scales (at z = 0.4, 3′′≈15 kpc), 3) the double peak method is biased towards selecting certain types of single AGN such as radio bright AGN (Smith et al. 2010), which is different than BAT AGN where only 0.5% are radio loud (Teng et al. 2011), 4) the double peak method has difficulty…”
- A LARGE SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR CLOSE SUPERMASSIVE BINARY AND RAPIDLY RECOILING BLACK HOLES (2011, unknown): “…could arise in biconical outflows from single active nuclei (see Crenshaw et al. 2010), some of them turn out to trace dual active nuclei in merging galaxies, as shown by followup studies (e.g., Comerford et al. 2009a,b; Liu et al. 2010a,b; Shen et al. 2010b; Smith et al. 2010b; Fu et al. 2010).”