2009/12/30 by Lisa M. Winter, L. M. Winter, Karen T. Lewis +6 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Doubly ionized oxygen #Emission spectrum #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Line (geometry) #Luminosity #Observatory #Physics #Sky #Spectral line #Telescope #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/710/1/503
84 pages, 20 figures, 17 tables, accepted in ApJ
arxiv created 2009/12/30 · openalex publication_date 2010/01/19 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The Swift Burst Alert Telescope survey of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is providing an unprecedented view of local AGNs (〈 z 〉 ≈ 0.03) and their host galaxy properties. In this paper, we present an analysis of the optical spectra of a sample of 64 AGNs from the nine month survey, detected solely based on their 14–195 keV flux. Our analysis includes both archived spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and our own observations from the 2.1 m Kitt Peak National Observatory telescope. Among our results, we include line ratio classifications utilizing standard emission line diagnostic plots, [O iii ] 5007 Å luminosities, and Hβ-derived black hole masses. As in our X-ray study, we find the type 2 sources to be less luminous (in [O iii ] 5007 Å and 14–195 keV luminosities) with lower accretion rates than the type 1 sources. We find that the optically classified low-ionization narrow emission line regions, H ii /composite galaxies, and ambiguous sources have the lowest luminosities, while both broad-line and narrow-line Seyferts have similar luminosities. From a comparison of the hard X-ray (14–195 keV) and [O iii ] luminosities, we find that both the observed and extinction-corrected [O iii ] luminosities are weakly correlated with X-ray luminosity. In a study of the host galaxy properties from both continuum fits and measurements of the stellar absorption indices, we find that the hosts of the narrow-line sources have properties consistent with late-type galaxies.