The Host Galaxies of AGN
Guinevere Kauffmann, Timothy M. Heckman, Christy Tremonti, Jarle, Brinchmann, Stephane Charlot, Simon D.M. White, Susan Ridgway, Jon Brinkmann,, Masataka Fukugita, Patrick Hall, Zeljko Ivezic, Gordon Richards, Donald, Schneider

TL;DR
This study analyzes the properties of host galaxies of a large sample of narrow-line AGN, revealing that high-luminosity AGN are associated with younger stellar populations and recent star formation, with host properties similar to early-type galaxies.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive comparison of host galaxy properties across AGN luminosities and establishes that young stellar populations are common in high-luminosity AGN hosts.
Findings
High-luminosity AGN hosts have younger stellar populations.
AGN hosts are mostly massive, early-type galaxies.
Recent star formation is prevalent in high-luminosity AGN hosts.
Abstract
We examine the properties of the host galaxies of 22,623 narrow-line AGN with 0.02<z<0.3 selected from a complete sample of 122,808 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We focus on the luminosity of the [OIII]5007 emission line as a tracer of the strength of activity in the nucleus. We study how AGN host properties compare to those of normal galaxies and how they depend on L[OIII]. We find that AGN of all luminosities reside almost exclusively in massive galaxies and have distributions of sizes, stellar surface mass densities and concentrations that are similar to those of ordinary early-type galaxies in our sample. The host galaxies of low-luminosity AGN have stellar populations similar to normal early-types. The hosts of high- luminosity AGN have much younger mean stellar ages. The young stars are not preferentially located near the nucleus of the galaxy, but are…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsGalaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
