The Eddington Ratio Distribution of Narrow Line Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

We measure the Eddington ratio distribution of local optical narrow-line active galactic nuclei (AGN) as a function of host galaxy properties, as a potential test of galaxy formation theories of AGN feedback. We extract central emission-line fluxes using data from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV Data Release 17. Using the line ratio diagnostic techniques of Ji & Yan (2020), we identify AGN galaxies and determine their H$\beta$ and [OIII] line luminosities. For all galaxies not identified as AGN, we determine the threshold line luminosity they would have needed to be identified as AGN. These luminosity thresholds allow us to account for selection effects that otherwise would lead to strongly biased results. From the H$\beta$ luminosities and luminosity detection thresholds, accounting for selection effects, we measure the luminosity and Eddington ratio distributions of Seyferts as a function of specific star formation rate (sSFR) and stellar mass. Defining $F_{\mathrm{AGN}}$ as the occurrence rate of AGN above a fixed Eddington ratio of $10^{-3}$, we find that $F_{\mathrm{AGN}}$ is constant or increasing with stellar mass for star forming galaxies and declines strongly with stellar mass for quiescent galaxies. At stellar masses ${\log }_{10}{M}_{\ast }>10.25$, the occurrence rate increases monotonically with sSFR. At low statistical significance, in our lowest mass bins $9.25<{\log }_{10}{M}_{\ast }<10.25$, $F_{\mathrm{AGN}}$ peaks at intermediate sSFR. These patterns reveal a complicated dependence of AGN activity on galaxy properties for theoretical models to explain.

32 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (15)

• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Universe
• The MaNGA Integral Field Unit Fiber Feed System for the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope
• Overview of the Instrumentation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• The Data Reduction Pipeline for the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU Galaxy Survey
• The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: pyPipe3D analysis release for 10,000 galaxies
• The Limitations of Optical Spectroscopic Diagnostics in Identifying AGNs in the Low Mass Regime
• The first measurement of the quasar lifetime distribution
• The Dependence of AGN Activity on Environment in SDSS
• The Role of Active Galactic Nuclei in the Quenching of Massive Galaxies in the SQuiGGLE Survey
• The connection between star formation and supermassive Black Hole activity in the local Universe
• Observational Evidence for Enhanced Black Hole Accretion in Giant Elliptical Galaxies
• The relationship between the incidence of X-ray selected AGN in nearby galaxies and star-formation rate
• Active Galactic Nuclei in the Green Valley at z$\sim$0.7