Role of environment on nuclear activity

Abstract

Motivated by the apparently conflicting results reported in the literature on the effect of environment on nuclear activity, we have carried out a new analysis by comparing the fraction of galaxies hosting active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the most overdense regions (rich galaxy clusters) and the most underdense ones (voids) in the local universe. Exploiting the classical BPT diagnostics, we have extracted volume limited samples of star forming and AGN galaxies. We find that, at variance with star-forming galaxies, AGN galaxies have similar distributions of specific star formation rates and of galactic ages (as indicated by the Dn4000 parameter) both in clusters and in voids. In both environments galaxies hosting AGNs are generally old, with low star formation activity. The AGN fraction increases faster with stellar mass in clusters than in voids, especially above 10^10.2 M(sun). Our results indicate that, in the local universe, the nuclear activity correlates with stellar mass and galaxy morphology and is weakly, if at all, affected by the local galaxy density.

Accepted by ApJ, 6 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Dependence of AGN Activity on Environment in SDSS
• The environment of AGN dwarf galaxies at z$\sim$0.7 from the VIPERS survey
• The effect of environment on AGN activity: the properties of radio and optical AGN in void, isolated and group galaxies
• Environments of dwarf galaxies with optical AGN characteristics
• LeMMINGs. VI. Connecting nuclear activity to bulge properties of active and inactive galaxies: radio scaling relations and galaxy environment