Transient and Highly Polarized Double-Peaked H-alpha Emission in the Seyfert 2 Nucleus of NGC 2110

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a transient, double-peaked H-alpha emission line in the polarized spectrum of NGC 2110, revealing a hidden disk-like broad-line region and suggesting similarities with double-peaked AGNs.

Contribution

It provides the first evidence of a disk-like BLR in a Seyfert 2 galaxy, expanding understanding of AGN structures and their geometries.

Findings

Detection of a transient, double-peaked H-alpha line in polarized flux.

Evidence of a hidden, disk-like broad-line region in NGC 2110.

Implication that Seyfert 2s and double-peaked emitters share similar geometries.

Abstract

We have discovered an extremely broad, double-peaked H-alpha emission line in the polarized flux spectrum of NGC 2110, establishing that this well-studied Seyfert 2 galaxy contains a disk-like hidden broad-line region (BLR). Several properties of NGC 2110 suggest that it is an obscured twin of Arp 102B, the prototypical double-peaked emission-line active galactic nucleus (AGN). A comparison between our data and previous spectra of NGC 2110 indicates that the double-peaked H-alpha feature is transient. The presence of a disk-like BLR in NGC 2110 has important implications for AGNs: it expands the range of properties exhibited by Seyfert 2 galaxies, and the fact that the BLR is obscured by a torus-like structure provides the first evidence that double-peaked emitters and classical Seyfert nuclei may have the same basic parsec-scale geometry.