Multi-wavelength and Environmental Properties of Variability Selected Low Luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This study uses high-cadence time-domain surveys to identify low luminosity AGNs that are often missed by traditional methods, revealing their unique properties and environmental preferences.

Contribution

It demonstrates that variability selection uncovers LLAGNs not detected by X-ray, IR, or emission line methods, highlighting a new approach for AGN identification.

Findings

LLAGNs are often missed by traditional selection methods.

Variability-selected LLAGNs are more common in dense galaxy environments.

X-ray spectra of some LLAGNs fit a power law model.

Abstract

We present the multi-wavelength and environmental properties of 37 variability-selected active galactic nuclei (AGNs), including 30 low luminosity AGNs (LLAGNs), using a high cadence time-domain survey (ASAS-SN) from a spectroscopic sample of 1218 nearby bright galaxies. We find that high-cadence time-domain surveys uniquely select LLAGNs that do not necessarily satisfy other AGN selection methods, such as X-ray, mid-IR, or BPT methods. In our sample, 3% of them pass the mid-infrared color based AGN selection, 18% pass the X-ray luminosity based AGN selection, and 60% pass the BPT selection. This result is supported by two other LLAGN samples from high-cadence time-domain surveys of TESS and PTF, suggesting that the variability selection method from well-sampled light curves can find AGNs that may not be discovered otherwise. These AGNs can have moderate to small amplitudes of variability from the accretion disk, but, of many of them, with no strong corona, emission lines from the central engine, or accretion power to dominate the mid-IR emission. The X-ray spectra of a sub-sample of bright sources are consistent with a power law model. Upon inspecting the environments of our sample, we find that LLAGNs are more common in denser environments of galaxy clusters in contrast with the trend established in the literature for luminous AGNs at low redshifts, which is broadly consistent with our analysis result for luminous AGNs limited by a smaller sample size. This contrast in environmental properties between LLAGN and luminous AGNs suggests that LLAGNs may have different trigger mechanisms.