We revisited the spectroscopic characteristics of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) by analysing a homogeneous sample of 296 NLS1s at redshift between 0.028 and 0.345, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7) public archive. We confirm that NLS1s are mostly characterized by Balmer lines with Lorentzian profiles, lower black hole masses and higher Eddington ratios than classic broad-line Seyfert 1 (BLS1s), but they also appear to be active galactic nuclei (AGNs) contiguous with BLS1s and sharing with them common properties. Strong Fe II emission does not seem to be a distinctive property of NLS1s, as low values of Fe II/Hβ are equally observed in these AGNs. Our data indicate that Fe II and Ca II kinematics are consistent with the one of Hβ. On the contrary, O I λ8446 seems to be systematically narrower and it is likely emitted by gas of the broad-line region more distant from the ionizing source and showing different physical properties. Finally, almost all NLS1s of our sample show radial motions of the narrow-line region highly ionized gas. The mechanism responsible for this effect is not yet clear, but there are hints that very fast outflows require high continuum luminosities (>10^44 erg s^-1) or high Eddington ratios (log (L_bol/L_Edd) > -0.1).

A spectroscopic analysis of a sample of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

CRACCO, VALENTINA;CIROI, STEFANO;BERTON, MARCO;LA MURA, GIOVANNI;RAFANELLI, PIERO
2016

Abstract

We revisited the spectroscopic characteristics of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) by analysing a homogeneous sample of 296 NLS1s at redshift between 0.028 and 0.345, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7) public archive. We confirm that NLS1s are mostly characterized by Balmer lines with Lorentzian profiles, lower black hole masses and higher Eddington ratios than classic broad-line Seyfert 1 (BLS1s), but they also appear to be active galactic nuclei (AGNs) contiguous with BLS1s and sharing with them common properties. Strong Fe II emission does not seem to be a distinctive property of NLS1s, as low values of Fe II/Hβ are equally observed in these AGNs. Our data indicate that Fe II and Ca II kinematics are consistent with the one of Hβ. On the contrary, O I λ8446 seems to be systematically narrower and it is likely emitted by gas of the broad-line region more distant from the ionizing source and showing different physical properties. Finally, almost all NLS1s of our sample show radial motions of the narrow-line region highly ionized gas. The mechanism responsible for this effect is not yet clear, but there are hints that very fast outflows require high continuum luminosities (>10^44 erg s^-1) or high Eddington ratios (log (L_bol/L_Edd) > -0.1).
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11577/3221198
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