The host galaxies of active galactic nuclei

By G. Kauffmann, T. Heckman, Christy A. Tremonti, J. Brinchmann, S. Charlot, Simon D. M. White, S. Ridgway, J. Brinkmann, M. Fukugita, P. Hall and 3 more. 2003

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We examine the properties of the host galaxies of 22 623 narrow-line active galactic nuclei (AGN) with 0.02 < z < 0.3 selected from a complete sample of 122 808 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We focus on the luminosity of the [O III] λ5007 emission line as a tracer of the strength of activity in the nucleus. We study how AGN host properties compare with those of normal galaxies and how they depend on L[O III]. We find that AGN of all luminosities reside almost exclusively in massive galaxies and have distributions of sizes, stellar surface mass densities and concentrations that are similar to those of ordinary early-type galaxies in our sample. The host galaxies of low-luminosity AGN have stellar populations similar to normal early types. The hosts of high-luminosity AGN have much younger mean stellar ages. The young stars are not preferentially located near the nucleus of the galaxy, but are spread out over scales of at least several kiloparsecs. A significant fraction of high-luminosity AGN have strong Hδ absorption-line equivalent widths, indicating that they experienced a burst of star formation in the recent past. We have also examined the stellar populations of the host galaxies of a sample of broad-line AGN. We conclude that there is no significant difference in stellar content between type 2 Seyfert hosts and quasars (QSOs) with the same [O III] luminosity and redshift. This establishes that a young stellar population is a general property of AGN with high [O III] luminosities.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a56fc43fc06a22ff129228d6672950522a2cdb30

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Citations in the corpus

SDSS-IV MaNGA : the impact of diffuse ionized gas on emission-line ratios, interpretation of diagnostic diagrams and gas metallicity measurements (2016, methodology): “On the classical BPT diagram (Baldwin et al. 1981; Veilleux & Osterbrock 1987; Kewley et al. 2001, 2006; Kauffmann et al. 2003), the location of an H ii region is mainly determined by its metallicity and ionization parameter (e.g., Kewley et al. 2002; Dopita et al. 2013).”
Escape of Lyman continuum radiation from local galaxies - Detection of leakage from the young starburst Tol 1247-232 (2013, background): “Pure AGNs are found above the solid line (Kewley et al. 2001), while pure star forming galaxies are found below the dashed line (Kauffmann et al. 2003).”
A NEW DIAGNOSTIC OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI: REVEALING HIGHLY ABSORBED SYSTEMS AT REDSHIFT >0.3 (2011, methodology): “The scarcity of BPT-AGNs in host galaxies with M⋆ < 1010 M⊙ was previously noted by Kauffmann et al. (2003).”
THE MOSDEF SURVEY: ELECTRON DENSITY AND IONIZATION PARAMETER AT z ∼ 2.3 (2015, methodology): “A detection in [N ii] is required because AGN are rejected using the demarcation of Kauffmann et al. (2003) in the [O iii]/Hβ vs. [N ii]/Hα diagram.”
Nebular Continuum and Line Emission in Stellar Population Synthesis Models (2016, methodology): “…sample is derived from galaxy spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7; York et al. 2000; Abazajian et al. 2009) and emission line fluxes measured from the publicly available SDSS DR7 MPA/JHU catalog4 (Kauffmann et al. 2003a; Brinchmann et al. 2004; Salim et al. 2007).”
Evolution and Environment of Early-Type Galaxies (2005, neutral): “There is some debate in the recent literature over the optimal method for defining the local environment of galaxies (Eisenstein 2003; Kauffmann et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004).”
The nature of LINER galaxies: Ubiquitous hot old stars and rare accreting black holes (2013, background): “Since the sample selection LINERs outnumber classical Seyferts 5:1, were often counted into the AGN class (Kauffmann et al. 2003; Kauffmann & Heckman 2009; Schawinski et al. 2007), and were being impacted by the different physical apertures covered at different redshifts (Fig.”
THE ROLE OF STARBURST–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS COMPOSITES IN LUMINOUS INFRARED GALAXY MERGERS: INSIGHTS FROM THE NEW OPTICAL CLASSIFICATION SCHEME (2009, background): “To obtain a more stringent sample of star-forming galaxies, Kauffmann et al. (2003) (hereafter Kau03) shifted the Ke01 line to form a semi-empirical upper boundary for the starforming branch observed with the SDSS.”
Nuclear Activity in Nearby Galaxies (2008, methodology): “Given that LINERs selected from SDSS are highly susceptible to extranuclear contamination, as discussed earlier, it is in fact quite surprising—and perhaps fortuitous—that the detection rates of these objects agree so well between the two surveys.”
Clues to the Origin of the Mass-Metallicity Relation: Dependence on Star Formation Rate and Galaxy Size (2007, methodology): “Kauffmann et al. (2003b) have similarly concluded that star formation histories are most sensitive to surface mass density.”
AGN Host Galaxies at z ~ 0.4-1.3: Bulge-dominated and Lacking Merger-AGN Connection (2005, background): “…black holes (SMBHs; Magorrian et al. 1998), that AGNs in the local universe ( ) reside pre-z 1 dominantly in massive, bulge-dominated host galaxies (Kauffmann et al. 2003), and that a tight correlation exists locally between SMBH mass and host galaxy properties such as bulge velocity dispersion…”
Predicting dust extinction from the stellar mass of a galaxy (2010, methodology): “Stellar mass estimates, M∗, have been calculated for the DR7 data by the MPA/JHU team,3 based upon fits to the total (CMODEL) SDSS photometry and following the philosophy of Kauffmann et al. (2003a) and Salim et al. (2007).”
SPACE DENSITY OF OPTICALLY SELECTED TYPE 2 QUASARS (2008, methodology): “…consider all objects with redshifts z < 0.83 (our previous sample was at redshifts 0.3 < z < 0.83, complemented by the z < 0.3 AGN samples by Hao et al. 2005a; Kauffmann et al. 2003); and (3) we use an improved algorithm for identifying weak broad components in Hα and Hβ (Figure 1 and text below).”
Chemical Abundances of DEEP2 Star-forming Galaxies at z~1.0-1.5 (2005, methodology): “Stellar masses have been derived for SDSS galaxies, based both on spectral features including the 4000Å break and HδA Balmer absorption index, and broadband photometry, as described in Kauffmann et al. (2003b).”
INSPIRALLING SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES: A NEW SIGNPOST FOR GALAXY MERGERS (2008, neutral): “Finally, we require that candidates have line flux ratios [O III] λ5007/Hβ > 3 to distinguish Seyferts from other line-emitting galaxies (Baldwin et al. 1981; Kauffmann et al. 2003; Yan et al. 2006).”
Colors of Active Galactic Nucleus Host Galaxies at 0.5 < z < 1.1 from the GEMS Survey (2004, positive): “Kauffmann et al. (2003) have recently presented their results based on the comparison of active and inactive galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) at 0:02 < z < 0:3.”
Ionization state of inter-stellar medium in galaxies: evolution, SFR-M * -Z dependence, and ionizing photon escape (2013, methodology): “We make an SDSS sample from the SDSS Data Release 7 MPA/JHU catalogue1 including emission line properties and stellar masses (Kauffmann et al. 2003b; Brinchmann et al. 2004; Salim et al. 2007).”
Faint high-redshift AGN in the Chandra deep field south: the evolution of the AGN luminosity function and black hole demography (2011, background): “We found that the AGN duty cycle increases at all redshift with the stellar mass. Similar trends have been found by Kauffmann et al. (2003), Best et al. (2005), Bundy et al. (2008), Yamada et al. (2009), and Brusa et al. (2009b) for optically-selected, radio-selected, and X-ray selected AGN.”