A New Iron Emission Template for Active Galactic Nuclei

Fe II emission is a prominent and ubiquitous feature in the spectra of broad-line Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) by producing a pseudo-continuum from UV to optical with complex and strong blends of the numerous emission lines themselves, other emission lines, and continuum. Since theoretical modeling of such intricate Fe II emission is very difficult and still far from able to reproduce observed data in detail, an empirical iron emission template, derived from observations of a narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy, is an essential and practical tool to obtain accurate measurements of all the emission lines and continuum in AGN spectra. However, the existing iron templates, based on the single prototypical strong Fe II emitter I Zw 1, are suffering from inadequate S/N and non-simultaneous, inconsistent data with limited wavelength coverage, which consequently limit the accuracy of all the spectral measurements. To overcome the limitations and construct an improved iron template with wide spectral coverage, high-quality UV and optical spectra for the new and better identified template galaxy, Mrk 493, were successfully obtained from our HST STIS program (GO-14744). We will show the preliminary results for multicomponent spectral decomposition of the data and template construction with application tests to various AGN spectra and comparison with previous templates.