Oxygen abundances in the narrow line regions of Seyfert galaxies and the metallicity-luminosity relation

Abstract

We present oxygen abundances relative to hydrogen (O/H) in the narrow line regions (NLRs) gas phases of Seyferts 1 (Sy 1s) and Seyferts 2 (Sy 2s) Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). We used fluxes of the optical narrow emission line intensities [$3500<\lambda ($Å$)<7000$] of 561 Seyfert nuclei in the local universe ($z\lesssim 0.31$) from the second catalog and data release (DR2) of the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey, which focuses on the \textit{Swift}-BAT hard X-ray ($\gtrsim 10$ keV) detected AGNs. We derived O/H from relative intensities of the emission lines via the strong-line methods. We find that the AGN O/H abundances are related to their hosts stellar masses and that they follow a downward redshift evolution. The derived O/H together with the hard X-ray luminosity ($L_{\mathrm{X}}$) were used to study the X-ray luminosity-metallicity ($L_{\mathrm{X}}$-$Z_{\mathrm{NLR}}$) relation for the first time in Seyfert galaxies. In contrast to the broad-line focused ($L_{\mathrm{X}}$-$Z_{\mathrm{BLR}}$) studies, we find that the $L_{\mathrm{X}}$-$Z_{\mathrm{NLR}}$ exhibit significant anti-correlations with the Eddington ratio (${\lambda }_{\mathrm{Edd}}$) and these correlations vary with redshifts. This result indicates that the low-luminous AGNs are more actively undergoing Interstellar Medium (ISM) enrichment through star formation in comparison with the more luminous X-ray sources. Our results suggest that the AGN is somehow driving the galaxy chemical enrichment, as a result of the inflow of pristine gas that is diluting the metal rich gas, together with a recent cessation on the circumnuclear star-formation.

17 pages, 12 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS, doi: 10.1093/mnras/stad217

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