An Initial Investigation of Active Galaxies in RESOLVE and ECO
Abstract
The volume-limited REsolved Spectroscopy Of a Local VolumE (RESOLVE) survey and its complementary Environmental COntext (ECO) catalog are dominated by low mass, gas-rich galaxies, as is typical of the bulk of large-scale structure in the local universe. These surveys, therefore, provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the complete large-scale environments of low-redshift AGN and nuclear starbursts in such galaxies, in order to search for external triggering, examine activity in relation to gas supply, and investigate the role of feedback. By data-mining multi-wavelength catalogs that use varied techniques, we identify known AGN in RESOLVE and ECO, including a population of gas-dominated low-mass galaxies. We take advantage of these surveys' multi-wavelength supporting data to investigate triggering, feedback, and the roles of environment and gas supply in this initial sample of active galaxies. Because biases in standard AGN candidate selection techniques (e.g. BPT, X-ray luminosity) make them individually poor selectors of AGN activity in star-forming and low mass (<10^10 Msun) host galaxies, we also seek to improve the identification of nuclear activity in such galaxies via combined analysis of star formation and AGN signatures. RESOLVE is supported by NSF grant AST-0955368
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #227
- Pub Date:
- January 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22731107N