Evidence for Black Holes in Green Peas from WISE colors and variability

TL;DR

This study investigates the presence of active galactic nuclei in Green Pea galaxies using WISE infrared data, identifying candidate black holes through color diagnostics and variability analysis, revealing a higher fraction of MIR variable AGN than previously observed.

Contribution

It demonstrates that mid-infrared diagnostics effectively identify AGN in low-mass, star-forming galaxies, uncovering candidates missed by other methods.

Findings

Identified 31 AGN candidates based on WISE color diagnostics.

Detected 2 variable AGN candidates through multi-epoch WISE photometry.

Found a higher fraction (~1.8%) of MIR variable sources in Green Pea galaxies.

Abstract

We explore the presence of active galactic nuclei (AGN)/black holes (BH) in Green Pea galaxies (GPs), motivated by the presence of high ionization emission lines such as HeII and [NeIII] in their optical spectra. In order to identify AGN candidates, we used mid-infrared (MIR) photometric observations from the all-sky Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission for a sample of 1004 GPs. Considering only $>5\sigma$ detections with no contamination from neighboring sources in AllWISE, we select 31 GPs out of 134 as candidate AGN based on a stringent 3-band WISE color diagnostic. Using multi-epoch photometry in W1 and W2 bands based on time-resolved unWISE coadd images, we find two sources exhibiting variability in both the WISE bands among 112 GPs with W1$\leqslant16$ mag and no contamination from neighboring sources in unWISE. These two variable sources were selected as AGN by the WISE 3-band color diagnostic as well. Compared to variable AGN fractions observed among low-mass galaxy samples in previous studies, we find a higher fraction ($\sim1.8\%$) of MIR variable sources among GPs, which demonstrates the uniqueness and importance of studying these extreme objects. Through this work, we demonstrate that MIR diagnostics are promising tools to select AGN that may be missed by other selection techniques (including optical emission-line ratios and X-ray emission) in star-formation dominated, low-mass, low-metallicity galaxies.