The different neighbours around Type-1 and Type-2 active galactic nuclei

Abstract

One of the most intriguing open issues in galaxy evolution is the structure and evolution of active galactic nuclei (AGN) that emit intense light believed to come from an accretion disk near a super-massive black hole (Rees 1984, Lynden-Bell 1969). To understand the zoo of different AGN classes, it has been suggested that all AGN are the same type of object viewed from different angles (Antonucci 1993). This model -- called AGN unification -- has been successful in predicting e.g. the existence of hidden broad optical lines in the spectrum of many narrow-line AGN. But this model is not unchallenged (Tran 2001) and it is an open problem whether more than viewing angle separates the so-called Type-1 and Type-2 AGN. Here we report the first large-scale study that finds strong differences in the galaxy neighbours to Type-1 and Type-2 AGN with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) (York et al. 2000) Data Release 7 (DR7) (Abazajian et al. 2008) and Galaxy Zoo (Lintott et al, 2008, Lintott et al 2011). We find strong differences in the colour and AGN activity of the neighbours to Type-1 and Type-2 AGN and in how the fraction of AGN residing in spiral hosts changes depending on the presence of a neighbour or not. These findings suggest that an evolutionary link between the two major AGN types might exist.Comment: Published in Nature Physics 10, 417-420 (2014); includes all supplementary material; this submission supersedes arXiv:1211.0528. Authors affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Swede