Investigating the accretion disk properties of young radio galaxies using the narrow-emission line diagnostics

  • Son, Dong-Hoon (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University) ;
  • Woo, Jong-Hak (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University) ;
  • Bennert, Vardha N. (Department of Physics, University of California Santa Barbara) ;
  • Fu, Hai (Astronomy Department, California Institute of Technology Research) ;
  • Nagao, Tohru (Center for Space and Cosmic Evolution, Ehime University) ;
  • Kawakatu, Nozomu (Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba) ;
  • Kim, Sang-Chul (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute)
  • Published : 2011.04.05

Abstract

To investigate whether radio galaxies have systematically different accretion disk compared to radio-quiet AGN, we obtained high quality optical spectra for a sample of 22 young radio galaxies, using the KAST Double Spectrograph at the Lick 3-m telescope. Young radio galaxies are particularly useful since the age of the radio phenomena is comparable to that of accretion disk. Based on the optical emission-line diagnostics of narrow line region, which is thought to be photoionized by the nuclear radiation, we constrain the states of the accretion disk. In addition to strong emission lines, i.e., [O I], [O II], [O III], and [Ne III], we use the [Ar III] line to break the degeneracy between the ionization parameter and the SED shape. We find that young radio galaxies show systematically different emission line ratios compared to radio-quiet Type II AGN, suggesting that young radio galaxies probably have the power-law SED without a strong big blue bump. We will present the main results of the emission-line diagnostics.

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