Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS
Volume 683, Issue 2, Pages L119-L122Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1086/591905
Keywords
galaxies : active; galaxies : individual (NGC 3341); galaxies : interactions; galaxies : nuclei; galaxies : Seyfert
Categories
Funding
- NSF [AST 05-48198]
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,
- Participating Institutions
- National Science Foundation
- US Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Japanese Monbukagakusho
- Max Planck Society
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
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We present the discovery of a triplet of emission-line nuclei in the disturbed disk galaxy NGC 3341, based on archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and new observations from the Keck Observatory. This galaxy contains two offset nuclei within or projected against its disk, at projected distances of 5.1 and 8.4 kpc from its primary nucleus and at radial velocity separation of less than 200 km s(-1) from the primary. These appear to be either dwarf ellipticals or the bulges of low-mass spirals whose disks have already been stripped off while merging into the primary galaxy. The inner offset nucleus has a Seyfert 2 spectrum and a stellar velocity dispersion of 70 +/- 7 km s(-1). The outer offset nucleus has very weak emission lines consistent with a LINER classification, and the primary nucleus has an emission-line spectrum close to the boundary between LINER/ H II composite systems and H II nuclei; both may contain accreting massive black holes, but the optical classifications alone are ambiguous. The detection of an offset active nucleus in NGC 3341 provides a strong suggestion that black hole accretion episodes during minor mergers can be triggered in the nuclei of dwarf secondary galaxies as well as in the primary.
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