The Excitation Mechanism of Extended Emission-Line Regions in Active Galaxies

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Hst Proposal Id #5926 Agn

Scientific paper

Ionized gas in the form of extended emission-line regions extending for several kpc from the nucleus is commonly found associated with radio sources and active galactic nuclei. These emission-line regions form excellent laboratories for diagnosing the physical mechanisms operating in the host active galaxy, and for investigating the effects of the active nucleus on the surrounding galaxian environment. Although models invoking photoionization by the ionizing UV and soft X- ray nuclear continuum at first glance appear to do an excellent job of predicting the relative intensities of the strongest optical emission-lines, they all suffer from the serious inability to reproduce accurately the electron temperature in the gas, indicating that another source of heating is required. We propose to determine unambiguously whether ``radiative autoionizing shocks'' are an important contributor to the ionization balance in the extended emission -line regions. We will do this by observing the UV emission from the brightest knot in the extended emission-line regions of 3 highly preselected active galaxies with the Faint Object Spectrograph. Investigation of the ionization mechanism requires mandatory observations in the satellite UV because the UV emission-lines are the critical determinants of the emission mechanism.

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