A low-luminosity type-1 QSO sample - A morphological study of nearby AGN hosts

TL;DR

This study examines the morphological features of 99 nearby AGN host galaxies, revealing a high prevalence of bars and structural peculiarities, to better understand the connection between galaxy structure and supermassive black holes.

Contribution

It provides detailed morphological analysis of a nearby AGN sample, highlighting the high occurrence of bars and peculiar structures, which informs galaxy evolution models.

Findings

High fraction of barred galaxies in the sample

Presence of various structural peculiarities

Insights into bulge-SMBH coevolution mechanisms

Abstract

There is growing evidence that every galaxy with a considerable spheroidal component hosts a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center. Strong correlations between the SMBH and the spheroidal component suggest a physical connection through a coevolutionary scenario. For very massive galaxies a merger-driven scenario is preferred, resulting in elliptical galaxies. In the nearby universe, we find many disk galaxies, showing no signs of recent interaction. Alternative secular evolutionary scenarios for such galaxies involve internal triggers like bars and spiral arms or minor mergers. We analyze a sample of 99 nearby galaxies (0.02 < z < 0.06) from the Hamburg/ESO survey in order to get insight into structural and dynamical properties of the hosts to trace the origin of the bulge-SMBH correlation. In this work, we first collect images of sample members to get an impression of the morphological distribution in the sample. In a second step, we start to analyze sensitive, high resolution near-infrared images of 20 galaxies, performing aperture photometry and bulge-disk decomposition with the BUDDA code. We find an unexpected high fraction of barred galaxies and many other structural peculiarities.