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A large sample of Kohonen selected E+A (post-starburst) galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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 Added by Helmut Meusinger
 Publication date 2016
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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We aim to create a large sample of local post-starburst (PSB) galaxies to study their characteristic properties, particularly morphological features indicative of gravitational distortions and indications for active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The selection is based on a huge Kohonen self-organising map (SOM) of about one million SDSS spectra. The SOM is made fully available for the astronomical community, in combination with an interactive user interface. We compiled a catalogue of 2665 PSB galaxies with redshifts z < 0.4. In the colour-mass diagram, the PSB sample is found to be clearly concentrated towards the region between the red and the blue cloud, in agreement with the idea that PSB galaxies represent the transitioning phase between actively and passively evolving galaxies. The relative frequency of morphologically distorted PSB galaxies is at least 57%, significantly higher than in a comparison sample. The search for AGNs based on conventional selection criteria in the radio and MIR results in a low AGN fraction of 2 - 3%. We confirm an MIR excess in the mean SED of the PSB galaxy sample that may indicate hidden AGNs, though other sources are also possible. (Abstract modified to match the arXiv format.)



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We exploit the spectral archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 to select unusual quasar spectra. The selection method is based on a combination of the power of self-organising maps and the visual inspection of a huge number of spectra. Self-organising maps were applied to nearly 10^5 spectra classified as quasars by the SDSS pipeline. Particular attention was paid to minimise possible contamination by rare peculiar stellar spectral types. We present a catalogue of 1005 quasars with unusual spectra. This large sample provides a useful resource for both studying properties and relations of/between different types of unusual quasars and selecting particularly interesting objects. The spectra are grouped into six types. All these types turn out to be on average more luminous than comparison samples of normal quasars after a statistical correction is made for intrinsic reddening. Both the unusual broad absorption line (BAL) quasars and the strong iron emitters have significantly lower radio luminosities than normal quasars. We also confirm that strong BALs avoid the most radio-luminous quasars. Finally, we create a sample of quasars similar to the two mysterious objects discovered by Hall et al. (2002) and briefly discuss the quasar properties and possible explanations of their highly peculiar spectra. (Abstract modified to match the arXiv format)
80 - V. Cracco , S. Ciroi , M. Berton 2016
We revisited the spectroscopic characteristics of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) by analysing a homogeneous sample of 296 NLS1s at redshift between 0.028 and 0.345, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7) public archive. We confirm that NLS1s are mostly characterized by Balmer lines with Lorentzian profiles, lower black hole masses and higher Eddington ratios than classic broad-line Seyfert 1 (BLS1s), but they also appear to be active galactic nuclei (AGNs) contiguous with BLS1s and sharing with them common properties. Strong Fe II emission does not seem to be a distinctive property of NLS1s, as low values of Fe II/H$beta$ are equally observed in these AGNs. Our data indicate that Fe II and Ca II kinematics are consistent with the one of H$beta$. On the contrary, O I $lambda$8446 seems to be systematically narrower and it is likely emitted by gas of the broad-line region more distant from the ionizing source and showing different physical properties. Finally, almost all NLS1s of our sample show radial motions of the narrow-line region highly-ionised gas. The mechanism responsible for this effect is not yet clear, but there are hints that very fast outflows require high continuum luminosities (> $10^{44}$ erg/s) or high Eddington ratios (log(L$_{rm bol}$/L$_{rm Edd}$) > -0.1).
We present a detailed characterization of the 849 broad-line quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. Our quasar sample covers a redshift range of 0.1<z<4.5 and is flux-limited to i_PSF<21.7 without any other cuts on quasar properties. The main sample characterization includes: 1) spectral measurements of the continuum and broad emission lines for individual objects from the coadded first-season spectroscopy in 2014; 2) identification of broad and narrow absorption lines in the spectra; 3) optical variability properties for continuum and broad lines from multi-epoch spectroscopy. We provide improved systemic redshift estimates for all quasars, and demonstrate the effects of signal-to-noise ratio on the spectral measurements. We compile measured properties for all 849 quasars along with supplemental multi-wavelength data for subsets of our sample from other surveys. The SDSS-RM sample probes a diverse range in quasar properties, and shows well detected continuum and broad-line variability for many objects from first-season monitoring data. The compiled properties serve as the benchmark for follow-up work based on SDSS-RM data. The spectral fitting tools are made public along with this work.
We have defined a sample of 63 AGN with strong forbidden high-ionisation line (FHIL) emission. These lines, with ionisation potentials >~ 100eV, respond to a portion of the spectrum that is often difficult to observe directly, thereby providing constraints on the EUV-soft X-ray continuum. The sources are selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) on the basis of their [Fe X]6374A emission, yielding one of the largest and the most homogeneous sample of FHIL-emitting galaxies. We fit a sequence of models to both FHILs ([Fe XI], [Fe X] and [Fe VII]) and lower-ionisation emission lines ([O III], [O I], H-alpha, [N II], [S II]) in the SDSS spectra. These data are combined with X-ray measurements from Rosat, which are available for half of the sample. The correlations between these parameters are discussed for both the overall sample and subsets defined by spectroscopic classifications. The primary results are evidence that: (1) the [Fe X] and [Fe XI] lines are photoionised and their strength is proportional to the continuum flux around 250 eV; (2) the FHIL-emitting clouds form a stratified outflow in which the [Fe X] and [Fe XI] source regions extend sufficiently close to the BLR that they are partially obscured in Seyfert 2s whereas the [Fe VII] source region is more extended and is unaffected by obscuration; (3) narrow-lined Seyfert 1s (NLS1s) tend to have the strongest [Fe X] flux (relative to lower-ionisation lines); and (4) the most extreme [Fe X] ratios (such as [Fe X]/[O III] or [Fe X]/[Fe VII]) are found in the NLS1s with the narrowest broad lines and appear to be an optical-band indication of objects with strong X-ray soft excesses.
[Abridged] We present here a new and homogeneous sample of 3340 galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) based solely on the observed strength of their Hdelta absorption line. These galaxies are commonly known as ``post-starburst or ``E+A galaxies, and the study of these galaxies has been severely hampered by the lack of a large, statistical sample of such galaxies. In this paper, we rectify this problem by selecting a sample of galaxies which possess an absorption Hdelta equivalent width of EW(Hdelta_max) - Delta EW(Hdelta_max) > 4A from 106682 galaxies in the SDSS. We have performed extensive tests on our catalog including comparing different methodologies of measuring the Hdelta absorption and studying the effects of stellar absorption, dust extinction, emission-filling and measurement error. The measured abundance of our Hdelta-selected (HDS) galaxies is 2.6 +/- 0.1% of all galaxies within a volume-limited sample of 0.05<z<0.1 and M(r*)<-20.5, which is consistent with previous studies of such galaxies in the literature. We find that only 25 of our HDS galaxies in this volume-limited sample (3.5+/-0.7%) show no evidence for OII and Halpha emission, thus indicating that true E+A (or k+a) galaxies are extremely rare objects at low redshift, i.e., only 0.09+/-0.02% of all galaxies in this volume-limited sample are true E+A galaxies. In contrast, 89+/-5% of our HDS galaxies in the volume-limited sample have significant detections of the OII and Halpha emission lines. We find 27 galaxies in our volume-limited HDS sample that possess no detectable OII emission, but do however possess detectable Halpha emission. These galaxies may be dusty star-forming galaxies. We provide the community with this new catalog of Hdelta-selected galaxies to aid in the understanding of these galaxies.
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