The most-luminous heavily-obscured quasars have a high merger fraction: morphological study of WISE-selected hot dust-obscured galaxies

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that WISE-selected hyperluminous, hot dust-obscured galaxies (Hot DOGs) are powered by highly dust-obscured, possibly Compton-thick AGNs. High obscuration provides us a good chance to study the host morphology of the most luminous AGNs directly. We analyze the host morphology of 18 Hot DOGs at $z\sim 3$ using Hubble Space Telescope/WFC3 imaging. We find that Hot DOGs have a high merger fraction ($62\pm 14\%$). By fitting the surface brightness profiles, we find that the distribution of Sérsic indices in our Hot DOG sample peaks around 2, which suggests that most of Hot DOGs have transforming morphologies. We also derive the AGN bolometric luminosity ($\sim 10^{14}{L}_{\odot }$) of our Hot DOG sample by using IR SEDs decomposition. The derived merger fraction and AGN bolometric luminosity relation is well consistent with the variability-based model prediction (Hickox et al. 2014). Both the high merger fraction in IR-luminous AGN sample and relatively low merger fraction in UV/optical-selected, unobscured AGN sample can be expected in the merger-driven evolutionary model. Finally, we conclude that Hot DOGs are merger-driven and may represent a transit phase during the evolution of massive galaxies, transforming from the dusty starburst dominated phase to the unobscured QSO phase.

5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters

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