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

No More Active Galactic Nuclei in Clumpy Disks Than in Smooth Galaxies at z~2 in CANDELS/3D-HST

Abstract

We use CANDELS imaging, 3D-HST spectroscopy, and Chandra X-ray data to investigate if active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are preferentially fueled by violent disk instabilities funneling gas into galaxy centers at 1.3 < z < 2.4. We select galaxies undergoing gravitational instabilities using the number of clumps and degree of patchiness as proxies. The CANDELS visual classification system is used to identify 44 clumpy disk galaxies, along with mass-matched comparison samples of smooth and intermediate morphology galaxies. We note that despite being mass-matched and having similar star formation rates, the smoother galaxies tend to be smaller disks with more prominent bulges compared to the clumpy galaxies. The lack of smooth extended disks is probably a general feature of the z ~ 2 galaxy population, and means we cannot directly compare with the clumpy and smooth extended disks observed at lower redshift. We find that z ~ 2 clumpy galaxies have slightly enhanced AGN fractions selected by integrated line ratios (in the mass-excitation method), but the spatially resolved line ratios indicate this is likely due to extended phenomena rather than nuclear AGNs. Meanwhile, the X-ray data show that clumpy, smooth, and intermediate galaxies have nearly indistinguishable AGN fractions derived from both individual detections and stacked non-detections. The data demonstrate that AGN fueling modes at z ~ 1.85—whether violent disk instabilities or secular processes—are as efficient in smooth galaxies as they are in clumpy galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2014 American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 February 16; accepted 2014 July 25; published 2014 September 11. We thank Frederic Bournaud for valuable discussion which significantly improved this work. Support was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant 51330 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA under contract NAS 5-26555. J.R.T. and the authors from UCSC also acknowledge support form NASA HST grants GO-12060.10-A and AR-12822.03, Chandra grant, and NSF grant AST-0808133. S.J. acknowledges financial support from the E.C. through an ERC grant StG-257720. This work made use of the Rainbow Cosmological Surveys Database, which is operated by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), partnered with the University of California Observatories at Santa Cruz (UCO/Lick, UCSC).

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Published - 0004-637X_793_2_101.pdf

Submitted - 1407.7525v1.pdf

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 17, 2023