The impact of environmental effects on AGN: a decline in the incidence of ionized outflows

Abstract

AGN have been generally considered to be less frequent in denser environments due to the lower number of galaxy-galaxy interactions and/or the removal of their gas-rich reservoirs by the dense intergalactic medium. However, recent observational and theoretical works suggest that the effect of ram-pressure stripping might reduce the angular momentum of their gas, causing it to infall towards the super massive black hole (SMBH) at their centre, activating the AGN phase. In this work we explore the connection between environment and nuclear activity by evaluating the variation in the incidence of ionized outflows in AGN across different environments. We select a sample of $\sim 3300$ optical AGN from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 13 that we match with the group catalogue from Lim et al. 2017. We further probe their environment through the projected distance to the central galaxy of the group/cluster and the projected surface density to the 5th neighbour (${\delta }_5$). We find that at lower masses ($<10^{10.3}$M${}_{\odot }$), the fraction of ionized outflows is significantly lower in satellite ($\sim 7$%) than in isolated ($\sim 22$%) AGN. The fraction of outflows in all satellite AGN decreases towards closer distances to the central, whereas only the lower-mass ones display a significant decline with ${\delta }_5$. Although this study does not include AGN in the densest regions of galaxy clusters, our findings suggest that AGN in dense environments accrete less gas than those in the field potentially due to the removal of the gas reservoirs via stripping or starvation, consistent with a negative connection between environment and AGN activity. We propose that the observed change in the incidence of outflows towards denser regions of groups and clusters could contribute to the higher gas metallicities of cluster galaxies compared to field ones, especially at lower masses.

9 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics

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