The galactic spin of AGN galaxies
| Autor: | Cervantes-Sodi, Bernardo, Hernandez, X., Park, Changbom, Choi, Yun-Young |
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| Rok vydání: | 2011 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Astrophysical Journal Letters 735 (2011), L25 |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1088/2041-8205/735/1/L25 |
| Popis: | Using an extensive sample of galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5, we compare the angular momentum distribution of active galactic nucleus (AGN) with non-AGN hosting late-type galaxies. To this end we characterize galactic spin through the dimensionless angular momentum parameter $\lambda$, which we estimate approximately through simple dynamical considerations. Using a volume limited sample, we find a considerable difference when comparing the empirical distributions of $\lambda$ for AGNs and non-AGN galaxies, the AGNs showing typically low $\lambda$ values and associated dispersions, while non-AGNs present higher $\lambda$ values and a broader distribution. A more striking difference is found when looking at $\lambda$ distributions in thin $M_{r}$ cuts, while the spin of non-AGN galaxies presents an anti-correlation with $M_{r}$, with bright (massive) galaxies having low spins, AGN host galaxies present uniform values of $\lambda$ at all magnitudes, a behavior probably imposed by the fact that most late-type AGN galaxies present a narrow range in color, with a typical constant $\lambda$ value. We also find that the fraction of AGN hosting galaxies in our sample strongly depends on galactic spin, increasing dramatically for decreasing $\lambda$. For AGN host galaxies we compute the mass of their supermassive black holes and find that this value tends to be higher for low spin galaxies, even at fixed luminosity, a result that could account, to a certain extent, for the spread on the luminosity black-hole mass relation. Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, published in ApJ Letters, final version |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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