Environmental dependence of AGN activity. I.: the effects of host galaxy

TL;DR

This study analyzes how host galaxy properties influence AGN activity, revealing that morphology and color are key factors in AGN hosting likelihood and accretion power, with late-type, intermediate-mass, and intermediate-color galaxies being the most active hosts.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the dependence of AGN activity on galaxy morphology, color, and other properties using a large SDSS sample, highlighting the importance of galaxy type and gas availability.

Findings

AGN fraction depends strongly on morphology and color.

Late-type, intermediate-mass galaxies are the main AGN hosts.

Bluer late-type galaxies host higher power AGNs.

Abstract

Using a large sample of local galaxies (144,940) with -17.5< Mr <-22 and 0.025< z <0.107, selected from SDSS DR5, we compare AGN host galaxies with non-AGN galaxies at matched luminosity, velocity dispersion, color, color gradient, or concentration index, to investigate how AGN activity is related with galaxy properties. The AGN sample is composed of Type II AGNs identified with flux ratios of narrow-emission lines with S/N > 6. We find that the fraction of galaxies hosting an AGN (f_AGN) depends strongly on morphology together with color, and very weakly on luminosity or velocity dispersion of host galaxies. In particular, f_AGN of early-type galaxies is almost independent of luminosity nor velocity dispersion when color is fixed. The host galaxy color preferred by AGNs is u-r ~2.0 for early-type hosts and u-r=2.0-2.4 for late-type hosts. This trend suggests that AGNs are dominantly hosted by intermediate-mass late-type galaxies. We also investigate how the accretion power varies with galaxy properties. While the Eddington ratio ([OIII] line luminosity normalized by black hole mass) ranges over three orders of magnitude for both morphological types, late-type galaxies are the dominant hosts over all AGN power. Among late-type galaxies, bluer color galaxies host higher power AGNs. These results are consistent with a scenario that more massive and redder galaxies are harder to host AGNs since these galaxiesalready consumed gas at the center or do not have sufficient gas supply to feed the black hole. In contrast, intermediate-mass, intermediate-color, and more concentrated late-type galaxies are more likely to host AGNs, implying that perhaps some fraction of low-mass, blue, and less concentrated lat e-type galaxiesmay not host massive black holes or may host very low-power AGNs.