2024/05/21 by James Negus, Julia M. Comerford, Negus, James +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.12873
openalex publication_date 2024/05/21 · openalex created_date 2024/05/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Broad Hα and Hβ emission lines (FWHM > 1,000 km s-1) are incredibly efficient tracers of the high-velocity clouds encircling Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). As a result, we search for these broad line AGN in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) catalog. We identify 301 broad-line Hα galaxies and 801 broad-line Hβ galaxies in the catalog. In total, we detect 1,042 unique broad-line galaxies with luminosities between 1037 - 1043 erg s-1; 60 feature both broad Hα and broad Hβ emission. We also determine that the broad line region radius ranges between 0.01 - 46 light days, with a median radius of 0.1 light days (0.02 pc) for our broad Hβ sample. In addition, we find that both samples feature a higher fraction of galaxy mergers (44% for the broad Hα sample and 43% for the broad Hβ sample), compared to the full MaNGA galaxy sample (26%), which suggests that merger-driven fueling is strongly active in our sample.