Spatially Resolved [O iii] Emission Line Kinematics of Reverberation-mapped Active Galactic Nuclei with the Keck Cosmic Web Imager

Author Info

• Raymond P. Remigio, University of California, Irvine
• Vivian U, California Institute of Technology
• Aaron J. Barth, University of California, Irvine
• Nico Winkel, Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Germany)
• Vardha N. Bennert, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis ObispoFollow
• Tommaso Treu, University of California, Los Angeles
• Matthew A. Malkan, University of California, Los Angeles
• Sebastian Contreras, San Diego State University
• Peter R. Williams, University of California, Los Angeles
• Jordan N. Runco, University of California, Los Angeles

Recommended Citation

Published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 992, Issue 1, October 3, 2025.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/adfe5d.

Abstract

We present optical integral-field spectroscopic data of ten nearby (0.02 ≤ z ≤ 0.05) Seyfert 1 galaxies taken with the Keck Cosmic Web Imager. We map the spatially resolved kinematics of the [O iii] gas and stars, and investigate the alignments between their global kinematic position angles (PAs). Large-scale gas motions are primarily dominated by rotation and are kinematically aligned with the stars (ΔPA ≤ 30°). However, eight galaxies exhibit nonrotational kinematic signatures (e.g., kinematic twists, possible outflows) in their ionized gas velocity fields near the nucleus. We compare aperture-wide measurements of the gas and stellar velocity dispersions (σgas and σ⋆) to test the use of the width of the [O iii] line core as a surrogate for σ⋆. Direct comparisons between σgas and σ⋆ show that σgas tends to underestimate σ⋆, and thus is not a reliable tracer of σ⋆ for our selected galaxies. We measure the extent of the narrow-line region (NLR) using several definitions, resulting in sizes of ∼0.1–10 kpc. For a given [O iii] luminosity, our NLR sizes derived from the [O iii]/Hβ flux ratio or an [O iii] isophotal radius are an order of magnitude larger than those measured from past imaging data.

Disciplines

Physics

Copyright

© 2025 The Authors. Published by the American Astronomical Society.

Number of Pages

21

Publisher statement

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the authors and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.