Data-driven dissection of emission-line regions in Seyfert galaxies

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
e-mail: beatriz.villarroel@physics.uu.se; andreas.korn@physics.uu.se

Received: 20 April 2016
Accepted: 25 August 2016

Abstract

Aims. Indirectly resolving the line-emitting gas regions in distant active galactic nuclei (AGN) requires both high-resolution photometry and spectroscopy (i.e. through reverberation mapping). Emission in AGN originates on widely different scales; the broad-line region (BLR) has a typical radius less than a few parsec, the narrow-line region (NLR) extends out to hundreds of parsecs. But emission also appears on large scales from heated nebulae in the host galaxies (tenths of kpc).

Methods. We propose a novel, data-driven method based on correlations between emission-line fluxes to identify which of the emission lines are produced in the same kind of emission-line regions. We tested the method on Seyfert galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) and Galaxy Zoo project.

Results. We demonstrate the usefulness of the method on Seyfert-1s and Seyfert-2 objects, showing similar narrow-line regions (NLRs). Preliminary results from comparing Seyfert-2s in spiral and elliptical galaxy hosts suggest that the presence of particular emission lines in the NLR depends both on host morphology and eventual radio-loudness. Finally, we explore an apparent linear relation between the final correlation coefficient obtained from the method and time lags as measured in reverberation mapping for Zw229-015.