Characterization of a sample of intermediate-type AGN. I. Spectroscopic properties and serendipitous discovery of new Dual AGN

Abstract

A sample of 10 nearby intermediate-type active galactic nuclei (AGN) drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7) is presented. The aim of this work is to provide estimations of the black hole mass for the sample galaxies from the dynamics of the broad line region. For this purpose, a detailed spectroscopic analysis of the objects was done. Using BPT diagnostic diagrams we have carefully classified the objects as true intermediate-type AGN and found that 80%$^{+7.2%}_{-17.3%}$ are composite AGN. The black hole mass estimated for the sample is within 6.54$\pm$0.16\,$<$\,log\,$M_{\mathrm{BH}}$\,$<$\,7.81$\pm$0.14. Profile analysis show that five objects (\object{J120655.63+501737.1}, \object{J121607.08+504930.0}, \object{J141238.14+391836.5}, \object{J143031.18+524225.8} and \object{J162952.88+242638.3}) have narrow double-peaked emission lines in both the red (H$\alpha$, [\ion{N}{2}]$\lambda \lambda$6548,6583 and [\ion{S}{2}]$\lambda \lambda$6716,6731) and the blue (H$\beta$ and [\ion{O}{3}]$\lambda \lambda$4959,5007) region of the spectra, with velocity differences ($\Delta V$) between the double peaks within 114\,$<\Delta V<$\,256 km s${}^{-1}$. Two of them, \object{J121607.08+504930.0} and \object{J141238.14+391836.5} are candidates for dual AGN since their double-peaked emission lines are dominated by AGN activity. In searches of dual AGN; Type 1, Type 1I and intermediate-type AGN should be carefully separated, due to the high serendipitous number of narrow double-peaked sources (50%$\pm$14.4%) found in our sample.

37 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables, accepted for ApJ, Nov 26, 2012 Subjects: Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)

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