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Published January 1, 2014 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Nuclear Star Formation Activity and Black Hole Accretion in Nearby Seyfert Galaxies

Abstract

Recent theoretical and observational works indicate the presence of a correlation between the star-formation rate (SFR) and active galactic nucleus (AGN) luminosity (and, therefore, the black hole accretion rate, Ṁ_(BH) of Seyfert galaxies. This suggests a physical connection between the gas-forming stars on kpc scales and the gas on sub-pc scales that is feeding the black hole. We compiled the largest sample of Seyfert galaxies to date with high angular resolution (~0.''4-0.''8) mid-infrared (8-13 μm) spectroscopy. The sample includes 29 Seyfert galaxies drawn from the AGN Revised Shapley-Ames catalog. At a median distance of 33 Mpc, our data allow us to probe nuclear regions on scales of ~65 pc (median value). We found no general evidence of suppression of the 11.3 μm polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission in the vicinity of these AGN, and we used this feature as a proxy for the SFR. We detected the 11.3 μm PAH feature in the nuclear spectra of 45% of our sample. The derived nuclear SFRs are, on average, five times lower than those measured in circumnuclear regions of 600 pc in size (median value). However, the projected nuclear SFR densities (median value of 22 M_☉ yr^(–1) kpc^(–2)) are a factor of 20 higher than those measured on circumnuclear scales. This indicates that the SF activity per unit area in the central ~65 pc region of Seyfert galaxies is much higher than at larger distances from their nuclei. We studied the connection between the nuclear SFR and Ṁ_(BH) and showed that numerical simulations reproduce our observed relation fairly well.

Additional Information

© 2014 American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 June 21; accepted 2013 November 3; published 2013 December 13. We thank E. Piconcelli for useful discussion and the anonymous referee for comments that helped us to improve the article. P.E. and A.A.H. acknowledge support from the Spanish Plan Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica under grant AYA2009-05705-E. P. E. is partially funded by the Spanish MINECO under grant AYA2012-39362-C02-01. A.A.H. and A.H.C. acknowledge support from the Augusto G. Linares Program through the Universidad de Cantabria. C.R.A. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Plan Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica under grant AYA2010-21887-C04.04 (Estallidos). O.G.M. and J.M.R.E. acknowledge support from the Spanish MICINN through the grant AYA2012-39168-C03-01. S.F.H. acknowledges support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the framework of a research fellowship (Auslandsstipendium). This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Our work is based on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), the Australian Research Council (Australia), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnología e Inovação (Brazil), and Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovaciόn Productiva (Argentina). The Cornell Atlas of Spitzer/IRS Sources (CASSIS) is a product of the Infrared Science Center at Cornell University, supported by NASA and JPL.

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Published - 0004-637X_780_1_86.pdf

Submitted - 1311.0703v1.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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