The local Universe in the era of large surveys -- II. Multi-wavelength characterisation of activity in nearby S0 galaxies

TL;DR

This study comprehensively characterizes activity in nearby S0 galaxies across multiple wavelengths, comparing diagnostic methods and exploring the origins of emission, revealing that many emissions are not star formation driven.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-wavelength analysis of S0 galaxy activity, integrating PCA-based spectral classification with traditional diagnostics, and compares activity indicators across different wavebands.

Findings

Nebular emission in radio and X-ray detected S0s is often not star formation driven.

Post-AGB stars may ionize some LINERs, not black hole activity.

The diagnostics and classifications are consistent across multiple wavelengths.

Abstract

This is the second paper in a series using data from tens of thousands S0 galaxies of the local Universe ($z\lesssim 0.1$) retrieved from the NASA-Sloan Atlas. It builds on the outcomes of the previous work, which introduced a new classification scheme for these objects based on the principal component analysis (PCA) of their optical spectrum and its projections on to the first two eigenvectors or principal components (the PC1$\unicode{x2013}$PC2 diagram). We provide a comprehensive characterization of the activity of present-day S0s throughout both the broad-band PC1$\unicode{x2013}$PC2 spectral classifier and the conventional narrow-line BPT/WHAN ones, contrasting the different types of activity classes they define, and present an alternative diagram that exploits the concordance between WHAN and PCA demarcations. The analysis is extended to the mid-infrared, radio and X-ray wavelengths by crossmatching our core sample with data from the WISE, FIRST, XMM$\unicode{x2013}$Newton, and Chandra surveys. This has allowed us to carry out a thorough comparison of the most important activity diagnostics in the literature over different wavebands, discuss their similarities and differences, and explore the connections between them and with parameters related to star formation and black hole accretion. In particular, we find evidence that the bulk of nebular emission from radio and X-ray detected S0$\unicode{x2013}$Seyfert and LINER systems is not driven by star birth, while the dominant ionising radiation for a number of LINERs might come from post-AGB stars. These and other outcomes from the present work should be transferable to other morphologies.