Environmental Effects on AGN activity via Extinction-free Mid-Infrared Census

TL;DR

This study investigates how galaxy environment influences AGN activity using infrared spectral energy distributions from the AKARI satellite, revealing complex trends for ULIRGs at different redshifts, with implications for future space missions.

Contribution

First to explore AGN activity dependence on environment using extinction-free IR SED modeling across redshift and luminosity ranges.

Findings

AGN activity in IR galaxies is largely unaffected by environment for LIRGs and less luminous galaxies.

For ULIRGs, AGN activity increases with density at high redshift but decreases at intermediate redshift.

Results suggest different physical mechanisms may drive AGN activity in ULIRGs at different epochs.

Abstract

How does the environment affect active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity? We investigated this question in an extinction-free way, by selecting 1120 infrared galaxies in the $AKARI$ North Ecliptic Pole Wide field at redshift $z$ $\leq$ 1.2. A unique feature of the $AKARI$ satellite is its continuous 9-band infrared (IR) filter coverage, providing us with an unprecedentedly large sample of IR spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies. By taking advantage of this, for the first time, we explored the AGN activity derived from SED modelling as a function of redshift, luminosity, and environment. We quantified AGN activity in two ways: AGN contribution fraction (ratio of AGN luminosity to the total IR luminosity), and AGN number fraction (ratio of number of AGNs to the total galaxy sample). We found that galaxy environment (normalised local density) does not greatly affect either definitions of AGN activity of our IRG/LIRG samples (log ${\rm L}_{\rm TIR}$ $\leq$ 12). However, we found a different behavior for ULIRGs (log ${\rm L}_{\rm TIR}$ $>$ 12). At our highest redshift bin (0.7 $\lesssim$ z $\lesssim$ 1.2), AGN activity increases with denser environments, but at the intermediate redshift bin (0.3 $\lesssim$ z $\lesssim$ 0.7), the opposite is observed. These results may hint at a different physical mechanism for ULIRGs. The trends are not statistically significant (p $\geq$ 0.060 at the intermediate redshift bin, and p $\geq$ 0.139 at the highest redshift bin). Possible different behavior of ULIRGs is a key direction to explore further with future space missions (e.g., $JWST$, $Euclid$, $SPHEREx$).