The nuclear starburst activity in the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 7679

¹ Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, PR China
² Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apdo Postal 70-264, Mexico D.F. 04510, México

Corresponding author: Q. S. Gu, qsgu@nju.edu.cn

Received: 28 May 2001
Accepted: 5 June 2001

Abstract

We present our recent spectrophotometric results of the infrared luminous Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 7679. We find compelling evidence for the presence of a recent nuclear starburst, revealed by the observations of a) the spectral features of high order Balmer absorption lines, b) the weak equivalent widths for CaIIK λ3933, CN λ4200, G-band λ4300 and MgIb λ5173, and c) the suggested UV stellar wind resonance lines (N V λ1240, Si IV λ1400 and C IV λ1550) in the IUE spectrum. Using the simple stellar population synthesis model, we find that in the nuclear 2" 2" region, the contributions from the old, intermediate and young components are 21.7% , 42.9% and 35.4% , respectively. These nuclear starburst activities might have been triggered by the close encounter with NGC 7682, as suggested by recent numerical simulations.