Searching for Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in the Milky Way's Backyard

Details Searching for Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in the Milky Way's Backyard Searching for Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in the Milky Way's Backyard

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21541110s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #411.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.241

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGNs) associated with intermediate-mass back holes (IMBHs) are important for investigations of the AGN phenomenon and the co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes. With the goal of obtaining an unbiased census of such objects, we have assembled a distance-limited sample of galaxies with measured redshifts drawn from three complementary resources: the ALFALFA H I survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). Here we report the results of a pilot study covering a 256 deg2 region where the three catalogs overlap. The absolute magnitude distribution of our galaxy sample, which consists of 317 objects with distances less than 80 Mpc and absolute g magnitudes brighter than -14, peaks at Mg = -15.5. Thus, a sample constructed in this manner is dominated by dwarf galaxies, which are the most likely objects to host IMBHs. Analyses of the spatial distribution of the galaxies in the sample and the completeness of the SDSS spectroscopy of their nuclei will be presented. Using spectra from the SDSS and our own observations, we have identified several AGNs in the sample - significant, because the volume it covers was not previously known to contain any bona fide Seyfert galaxies. At least two of these Seyfert galaxies are potential IMBH candidates, in host galaxies with Mg = -18.1 and Mg = -17.0.

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