BAT AGN spectroscopic survey–II. X-ray emission and high-ionization optical emission lines

Creators: Berney, Simon; Koss, Michael; Trakhtenbrot, Benny; Ricci, Claudio; Lamperti, Isabella; Schawinski, Kevin; Baloković, Mislav; Crenshaw, D. Michael; Fischer, Travis; Gehrels, Neil; Harrison, Fiona; Hashimoto, Yasuhiro; Ichikawa, Kohei; Mushotzky, Richard; Oh, Kyuseok; Stern, Daniel; Treister, Ezequiel; Ueda, Yoshihiro; Veilleux, Sylvain; Winter, Lisa

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between X-ray and optical line emission in 340 nearby (z ≃ 0.04) AGN selected above 10 keV using Swift BAT. We find a weak correlation between the extinction corrected [O iii] and hard X-ray luminosity (L^(int)_([OIII])∝L_(14-195) with a large scatter (R_(Pear) = 0.64, σ = 0.62 dex) and a similarly large scatter with the intrinsic 2–10 keV to [O iii] luminosities (R_(Pear) = 0.63, σ = 0.63 dex). Correlations of the hard X-ray fluxes with the fluxes of high-ionization narrow lines ([O iii], He ii, [Ne iii] and [Ne v]) are not significantly better than with the low-ionization lines (H α, [S ii]). Factors like obscuration or physical slit size are not found to be a significant part of the large scatter. In contrast, the optical emission lines show much better correlations with each other (σ = 0.3 dex) than with the X-ray flux. The inherent large scatter questions the common usage of narrow emission lines as AGN bolometric luminosity indicators and suggests that other issues such as geometrical differences in the scattering of the ionized gas or long-term AGN variability are important.

Additional Information

© 2015 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2015 September 17. Received 2015 September 17; in original form 2015 June 27. First published online October 20, 2015. MK acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the Ambizione fellowship grant PZ00P2_154799/1. MK and KS acknowledge support from SNSF grant PP00P2 138979/1. Support for the work of ET was provided by the Center of Excellence in Astrophysics and Associated Technologies (PFB 06), by the FONDECYT regular grant 1120061 and by the CONICYT Anillo project ACT1101. The work of DS was carried out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. MB acknowledges support from NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program, grant NNX14AQ07H. CR acknowledges financial support from the CONICYT-Chile EMBIGGEN Anillo (grant ACT1101). 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, Tecnologia e Inovaça˜a~o (Brazil) and Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina). Data in this paper were acquired through the Gemini Science Archive and processed using the Gemini IRAF package and Gemini PYTHON. Data from Gemini programmes GN-2009B-Q-114, GN-2010A-Q-35, GN-2011A-Q-81, GN-2011B-Q-96, GN-2012A-Q-28, GN-2012B-Q-25, GS-2010A-Q-54, and GS-2011B-Q80 were used in this publication. We acknowledge the work that the Swift BAT team has done to make this work possible. The Kitt Peak National Observatory observations were obtained using MD-TAC time as part of the thesis of MK and LW at the University of Maryland. Kitt Peak National Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science. This research made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS website is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington. 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. This research made use of ASTROPY, a community-developed core PYTHON package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013). This research made use of APLPY, an open-source plotting package for PYTHON hosted at http://aplpy.github.com. This research has made use of the SIMBAD data base, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. This research made use of data and/or software provided by the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), which is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. This research made use of PySpeckit, an open-source spectral analysis and plotting package for PYTHON hosted at http://pyspeckit.bitbucket.org.

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