Evidence for Black Holes in Green Peas from WISE colors and variability
Santosh Harish, Sangeeta Malhotra, James E. Rhoads, Tianxing Jiang,, Huan Yang, and Kendrick Knorr

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 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 mag and no contamination from neighboring sources in unWISE. These two variable sources were selected as AGN by the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGalaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations
