Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 439, Issue 1, Pages 861-877Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu009
Keywords
surveys; galaxies: active; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: statistics; infrared: galaxies
Categories
Funding
- National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) [2008-0060544]
- Korea government (MSIP)
- EU COST Action 'Black Holes in a Violent Universe'
- Centre for Astrophysics Research (CAR) at the University of Hertfordshire
- STFC [ST/F002556/1, ST/J001333/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/F002556/1, ST/J001333/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- National Research Foundation of Korea [2008-0060544] Funding Source: Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KISTI), National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS)
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There is an ongoing debate concerning the driver of nuclear activity in galaxies, with active galactic nuclei (AGN) either being triggered by major or minor galactic mergers or, alternatively, through secular processes like cold gas accretion and/or formation of bars. We investigate the close environment of active galaxies selected in the X-ray, the radio and the mid-IR. We utilize the first data release of the new near-IR VISTA Deep Extragalactic Observations (VIDEO) survey of the XMM-Large Scale Structure field. We use two measures of environment density, namely counts within a given aperture and a finite redshift slice (pseudo-3D density) and closest neighbour density measures Sigma(2) and Sigma(5). We select both AGN and control samples, matching them in redshift and apparent K-s-band magnitude. We find that AGN are found in a range of environments, with a subset of the AGN samples residing in overdense environments. Seyfert-like X-ray AGN and flat-spectrum radio-AGN are found to inhabit significantly overdense environments compared to their control sample. The relation between overdensities and AGN luminosity does not however reveal any positive correlation. Given the absence of an environment density-AGN luminosity relation, we find no support for a scheme where high-luminosity AGN are preferentially triggered by mergers. On the contrary, we find that AGN likely trace over dense environments at high redshift due to the fact that they inhabit the most massive galaxies, rather than being an AGN.
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