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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
An Active Galactic Nucleus Caught In The Act Of Turning Off And On, Julia M. Comerford, R Scott Barrows, Francisco Müller Sánchez, Rebecca Nevin, Jenny E. Greene, David Pooley, Daniel Stern, Fiona A. Harrison
An Active Galactic Nucleus Caught In The Act Of Turning Off And On, Julia M. Comerford, R Scott Barrows, Francisco Müller Sánchez, Rebecca Nevin, Jenny E. Greene, David Pooley, Daniel Stern, Fiona A. Harrison
Physics and Astronomy Faculty Research
We present the discovery of an active galactic nucleus (AGN) that is turning off and then on again in the z = 0.06 galaxy SDSS J1354+1327. This episodic nuclear activity is the result of discrete accretion events that could have been triggered by a past interaction with the companion galaxy that is currently located 12.5 kpc away. We originally targeted SDSS J1354+1327 because its Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectrum has narrow AGN emission lines that exhibit a velocity offset of 69 km s−1 relative to systemic. To determine the nature of the galaxy and its velocity-offset emission lines, we …
Spatially Offset Active Galactic Nuclei. Ii. Triggering In Galaxy Mergers, R Scott Barrows, Julia M. Comerford, Jenny E. Greene, David Pooley
Spatially Offset Active Galactic Nuclei. Ii. Triggering In Galaxy Mergers, R Scott Barrows, Julia M. Comerford, Jenny E. Greene, David Pooley
Physics and Astronomy Faculty Research
Galaxy mergers are likely to play a role in triggering active galactic nuclei (AGNs), but the conditions under which this process occurs are poorly understood. In Paper I, we constructed a sample of spatially offset X-ray AGNs that represent galaxy mergers hosting a single AGN. In this paper, we use our offset AGN sample to constrain the parameters that affect AGN observability in galaxy mergers. We also construct dual-AGN samples with similar selection properties for comparison. We find that the offset AGN fraction shows no evidence for a dependence on AGN luminosity, while the dual-AGN fractions show stronger evidence for …