AGNs are not that cool: revisiting the intrinsic AGN far-infrared spectral energy distribution

Abstract

We investigate the intrinsic spectral energy distribution (SED) of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at infrared (IR) bands with 42 $z<0.5$ optically luminous Palomar Green survey quasars through SED decomposition. We decompose the SEDs of the 42 quasars by combining an AGN IR template library Siebenmorgen2015 that covers a wide range of the AGN parameter space with three commonly used galaxy template libraries. We determine the median AGN SED from the best-fitting results. The far-IR (FIR) contribution of our median AGN SED is significantly smaller than that of Symeonidis et al. 2016, but roughly consistent with that of Lyu et al. 2017. The AGN IR SED becomes cooler with increasing bolometric luminosity, which might be due to that more luminous AGNs might have stronger radiative feedback to change torus structures and/or their tori might have higher metallicities. Our conclusions do not depend on the choice of galaxy template libraries. However, since the predicted polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission line flux is galaxy template-dependent, cautions should be taken on deriving galaxy FIR contribution from PAH fluxes.

15 pages, 14 figures, Accepted to ApJ. Tables 2 & 3 and the fitting results can be downloaded from https://www.mysun.work/research/agn-ir-seds/

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• The Infrared Emission and Vigorous Star Formation of Low-redshift Quasars
• Infrared emission of $z\sim 6$ galaxies: AGN imprints
• An ALMA Survey of the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey UKIDSS/UDS Field: The Far-infrared/Radio correlation for High-redshift Dusty Star-forming Galaxies
• A panchromatic view of infrared quasars: excess star formation and radio emission in the most heavily obscured systems
• The post-Herschel view of intrinsic AGN emission: constructing templates for galaxy and AGN emission at IR wavelengths
• On the intrinsic AGN emission in far-infrared/sub-mm
• The star-formation rates of QSOs
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