A High Fraction of Double-peaked Narrow Emission Lines in Powerful Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

One percent of redshift z~0.1 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) show velocity splitting of a few hundred km/s in the narrow emission lines in spatially integrated spectra. Such line profiles have been found to arise from the bulk motion of ionized gas clouds associated with galactic-scale outflows, merging pairs of galaxies each harboring a supermassive black hole (SMBH), and/or galactic-scale disk rotation. It remains unclear, however, how the frequency of narrow-line velocity splitting may depend on AGN luminosity. Here we study the correlation between the fraction of Type 2 AGNs with double-peaked narrow emission lines and AGN luminosity as indicated by [O III]5007 emission-line luminosity L_[O III]. We combine the sample of Liu et al. (2010) at z~0.1 with a new sample of 178 Type 2 AGNs with double-peaked [O III] emission lines at z~0.5. We select the new sample from a parent sample of 2089 Type 2 AGNs from the SDSS-III/Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We find a statistically significant (~4.2σ) correlation between L_[O III] and the fraction of objects that exhibit double-peaked narrow emission lines among all Type 2 AGNs, corrected for selection bias and incompleteness due to [O III] line width, equivalent width, splitting velocity, and/or equivalent width ratio between the two velocity components. Our result suggests that galactic-scale outflows and/or merging pairs of SMBHs are more prevalent in more powerful AGNs, although spatially resolved follow up observations are needed to resolve the origin(s) for the narrow-line velocity splitting for individual AGNs.

13 pages, 7 figures, accepted to MNRAS; the full Table 1 is available at http://mars.astro.illinois.edu/~xinliu/bossdp/LyuLiu2016_bossdp_table1.dat

References in corpus (23)

• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Host Galaxies and Classification of Active Galactic Nuclei
• A Catalog of Quasar Properties from SDSS DR7
• Galaxy Pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey I: Star Formation, AGN Fraction, and the Luminosity/Mass-Metallicity Relation
• The diversity of quasars unified by accretion and orientation
• Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers in Dynamical Galactic Environments
• On the nature of Seyfert galaxies with high [OIII]5007 blueshifts
• Merging and Clustering of the Swift BAT AGN Sample
• Massive binary black holes in galactic nuclei and their path to coalescence
• Kinematics of the Narrow-Line Region in the Seyfert 2 Galaxy NGC 1068: Dynamical Effects of the Radio Jet
• Active Galactic Nucleus Pairs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I. The Frequency on ~ 5-100 kpc Scales
• Type II Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: V. Imaging host galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope
• The clustering of narrow-line AGN in the local Universe
• Interactions, star formation and AGN activity
• The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: AEGIS Observations of a Dual AGN at z=0.7
• Spectroscopic Identification of Type 2 Quasars at Z < 1 in SDSS-III/BOSS
• Feedback from Mass Outflows in Nearby Active Galactic Nuclei. II. Outflows in the Narrow-Line Region of NGC 4151
• The Growth of Black Holes: Insights From Obscured Active Galaxies
• Extended X-ray Emission From a Quasar-Driven Superbubble
• Fundamental physics and cosmology with LISA
• Evidence from the Very Long Baseline Array that J1502SE/SW are Double Hotspots, not a Supermassive Binary Black Hole
• A Search for Double-peaked narrow emission line Galaxies and AGNs in the LAMOST DR1
• Chandra X-ray and Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of Optically Selected Kiloparsec-Scale Binary Active Galactic Nuclei II: Host Galaxy Morphology and AGN Activity

Cited by in corpus (9)

• The Quest for Dual and Binary Supermassive Black Holes: A Multi-Messenger View
• Quasar Feedback Survey: Multi-phase outflows, turbulence and evidence for feedback caused by low power radio jets inclined into the galaxy disk
• BASS XXIV: The BASS DR2 Spectroscopic Line Measurements and AGN Demographics
• Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 Identifies an $r_p$ = 1 Kpc Dual Active Galactic Nucleus in the Minor Galaxy Merger SDSS J0924+0510 at z = 0.1495
• Very Long Baseline Array Imaging of Type-2 Seyferts with Double-Peaked Narrow Emission Lines: Searches for Sub-kpc Dual AGNs and Jet-Powered Outflows
• Active Galactic Nucleus Pairs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. III. Chandra X-ray Observations Unveil Obscured Double Nuclei
• The correlated variations of C IV narrow absorption lines and quasar continuum
• A New Multi-Wavelength Census of Blazars
• NOEMA Detection of Circumnuclear Molecular Gas in X-ray Weak Dual Active Galactic Nuclei: No Evidence for Heavy Obscuration