GOODS-Herschel: radio-excess signature of hidden AGN activity in distant star-forming galaxies

TL;DR

This study introduces a new SED fitting method to identify hidden, heavily obscured AGN in distant star-forming galaxies, revealing a significant population of radio-excess AGN with diverse properties and implications for galaxy evolution.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel spectral energy distribution fitting approach to detect radio-excess and obscured AGN in distant galaxies, expanding the understanding of AGN demographics.

Findings

Identified 51 radio-excess AGN out to z~3 with lower IR/radio ratios.

Approximately 45% of these AGN show mid-IR dominance, others only radio excess.

Nearly half are X-ray undetected, indicating heavy obscuration.

Abstract

We present here a new spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting approach that we adopt to select radio-excess sources amongst distant star-forming galaxies in the GOODS-Herschel (North) field and to reveal the presence of hidden, highly obscured AGN. Through extensive SED analysis of 458 galaxies with radio 1.4 GHz and mid-IR 24 um detections using some of the deepest Chandra X-ray, Spitzer and Herschel infrared, and VLA radio data available to date, we have robustly identified a sample of 51 radio-excess AGN (~1300 deg^-2) out to redshift z~3. These radio-excess AGN have a significantly lower far-IR/radio ratio (q<1.68) than the typical relation observed for star-forming galaxies (q~2.2). We find that ~45% of these radio-excess sources have a dominant AGN component in the mid-IR band, while for the remainders the excess radio emission is the only indicator of AGN activity. The fraction of radio-excess AGN increases with X-ray luminosity reaching ~60% at Lx~10^44-10^45 erg/s, making these sources an important part of the total AGN population. However, almost half (24/51) of these radio-excess AGN are not detected in the deep Chandra X-ray data, suggesting that some of these sources might be heavily obscured. We also find that the specific star formation rates (sSFRs) of the radio-excess AGN are on average lower that those observed for X-ray selected AGN hosts, indicating that our sources are forming stars more slowly than typical AGN hosts, and possibly their star formation is progressively quenching.