The Baldwin effect in the narrow emission lines of AGNs

TL;DR

This study investigates the Baldwin effect in narrow emission lines of AGNs, revealing a consistent slope across various lines and exploring factors like metallicity and continuum variability influencing this phenomenon.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Baldwin effect in narrow lines across a wide ionization range using SDSS data, highlighting the role of continuum variations.

Findings

Most narrow lines show a Baldwin effect slope of about -0.2.

Deviations in some lines are explained by metallicity and star-formation contamination.

A model with continuum variability reproduces the observed slope.

Abstract

The anti-correlations between the equivalent widths of emission lines and the continuum luminosity in AGNs, known as the Baldwin effect are well established for broad lines, but are less well studied for narrow lines. In this paper we explore the Baldwin effect of narrow emission lines over a wide range of ionization levels and critical densities using a large sample of broad-line, radio-quiet AGNs taken from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 4. These type1 AGNs span three orders of magnitude in continuum luminosity. We show that most narrow lines show a similar Baldwin effect slope of about -0.2 while the significant deviations of the slopes for [NII] 6583, [OII] 3727, [NeV] 3425, and the narrow component of Ha can be explained by the influence of metallicity, star-formation contamination and possibly by difference in the shape of the UV-optical continuum. The slopes do not show any correlation with either the ionization potential or the critical density. We show that a combination of 50% variations in continuum near 5100A and a log-normal distribution of observed luminosity can naturally reproduce a constant Baldwin effect slope of -0.2 for all narrow lines. The variations of the continuum could be due to variability, intrinsic anisotropic emission, or an inclination effect.