A Novel Method to Identify AGNs Based on Emission Line Excess and the Nature of Low-luminosity AGNs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: II - Nature of Low-luminosity AGNs

TL;DR

This study introduces a new method for identifying low-luminosity AGNs in SDSS data and explores their properties, revealing their preference for massive, star-forming galaxies and their co-evolution with host galaxies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel AGN identification technique and provides insights into the relationship between AGN activity and host galaxy evolution, especially for low-luminosity AGNs.

Findings

AGNs show typical extinction of tau_V=1.2.

Strong AGNs are found in actively star-forming galaxies.

Black hole growth correlates with galaxy growth, indicating co-evolution.

Abstract

We develop a novel method to identify active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and study the nature of low-luminosity AGNs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This is the second part of a series of papers and we study the correlations between the AGN activities and host galaxy properties. Based on a sample of AGNs identified with the new method developed in Paper-I, we find that AGNs typically show extinction of tau_V=1.2 and they exhibit a wide range of ionization levels. The latter finding motivates us to use [OII]+[OIII] luminosity as an indicator of AGN power. We find that AGNs are preferentially located in massive, red, early-type galaxies. By carefully taking into account a selection bias of the Oxygen-excess method, we show that strong AGNs are located in actively star forming galaxies and rapidly growing super-massive black holes are located in rapidly growing galaxies, which clearly shows the co-evolution of super-massive black holes and the host galaxies. This is a surprising phenomenon given that the growths of black holes and host galaxies occur at very different physical scales. Interestingly, the AGN power does not strongly correlate with the host galaxy mass. It seems that mass works like a 'switch' to activate AGNs. The absence of AGNs in low-mass galaxies might be due the absence of super-massive black holes in those galaxies, but a dedicated observation of nuclear region of nearby low-mass galaxies would be necessarily to obtain deeper insights into it.