Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS
Volume 715, Issue 1, Pages L30-L34Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/715/1/L30
Keywords
black hole physics; galaxies: active; galaxies: interactions; galaxies: nuclei; galaxies: Seyfert; quasars: general
Categories
Funding
- NSF [AST-0707266]
- Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Japanese Monbukagakusho
- Max Planck Society
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
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We report the discovery of four kpc-scale binary active galactic nuclei (AGNs). These objects were originally selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey based on double-peaked [O III] lambda lambda 4959, 5007 emission lines in their fiber spectra. The double peaks could result from pairing active supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in a galaxy merger or could be due to bulk motions of narrow-line region gas around a single SMBH. Deep near-infrared (NIR) images and optical slit spectra obtained from the Magellan 6.5 m and the Apache Point Observatory 3.5 m telescopes strongly support the binary SMBH scenario for the four objects. In each system, the NIR images reveal tidal features and double stellar components with a projected separation of several kpc, while optical slit spectra show two Seyfert 2 nuclei spatially coincident with the stellar components, with line-of-sight velocity offsets of a few hundred km s(-1). These objects were drawn from a sample of only 43 objects, demonstrating the efficiency of this technique to find kpc-scale binary AGNs.
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