To constrain the nature and fraction of the ionized gas outflows in AGNs, we perform a detailed analysis on gas kinematics as manifested by the velocity dispersion and shift of the [O iii] λ5007 emission line, using a large sample of ∼39,000 type 2 AGNs at z<0.3. First, we confirm a broad correlation between [O iii] and stellar velocity dispersions, indicating that the bulge gravitational potential plays a main role in determining the [O iii] kinematics. However, [O iii] velocity dispersion is on average larger than stellar velocity dispersion by a factor of 1.3-1.4 for AGNs with double Gaussian [O iii], suggesting that the non-gravitational component, i.e., outflows, is almost comparable to the gravitational component. Second, the increase of the [O iii] velocity dispersion (after normalized by stellar velocity dispersion) with both AGN luminosity and Eddington ratio suggests that nongravitational kinematics are clearly linked to AGN accretion. The distribution in the [O iii] velocityvelocity dispersion diagram dramatically expands toward large values with increasing AGN luminosity, implying that the launching velocity of gas outflows increases with AGN luminosity. Third, the majority of luminous AGNs presents the non-gravitational kinematics in the [O iii] profile. These results suggest that ionized gas outflows are prevalent among type 2 AGNs. On the other hand, we find no strong trend of the [O iii] kinematics with radio luminosity, once we remove the effect of the bulge gravitational potential, indicating that ionized gas outflows are not directly related to radio activity for the majority of type 2 AGNs.

In the Spring of 2011 we carried out a 2.5 month reverberation mapping campaign using the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory, monitoring 15 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies. This paper describes the observations, reductions and measurements, and data products from the spectroscopic campaign. The reduced spectra were fitted with a multicomponent model in order to isolate the contributions of various continuum and emission-line components. We present light curves of broad emission lines and the AGN continuum, and measurements of the broad Hβ line widths in mean and root-mean square (rms) spectra. For the most highly variable AGNs we also measured broad Hβ line widths and velocity centroids from the nightly spectra. In four AGNs exhibiting the highest variability amplitudes, we detect anticorrelations between broad Hβ width and luminosity, demonstrating that the broad-line region "breathes" on short timescales of days to weeks in response to continuum variations. We also find that broad Hβ velocity centroids can undergo substantial changes in response to continuum variations; in NGC 4593 the broad Hβ velocity shifted by ∼ 250 km s −1 over a one-month duration. This reverberation-induced velocity shift effect is likely to contribute a significant source of confusion noise to binary black hole searches that use multi-epoch quasar spectroscopy to detect binary orbital motion. We also present results from simulations that examine biases that can occur in measurement of broad-line widths from rms spectra due to the contributions of continuum variations and photon-counting noise.

Outflows driven by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are often invoked as agents of the long-sought AGN feedback. Yet, characterizing and quantifying the impact on their host galaxies has been challenging. We present Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph integral field unit data of six local (z 0.1 < ) and luminous (L 10In the first of a series of papers, we investigate the kinematics and constrain the size of the outflows. The ionized gas kinematics can be described as a superposition of a gravitational component that follows the stellar motion and an outflow-driven component that shows large velocity (up to 600 km s −1 ) and large velocity dispersion (up to 800 km s −1 ). Using the spatially resolved measurements of the gas, we kinematically measure the size of the outflow, which is found to be between 1.3 and 2.1 kpc. Owingto the lack of a detailed kinematic analysis, previous outflow studies likely overestimate their size by up to more than a factor of two, depending on how the size is estimated and whether the [O III] or Hα emission line is used. The relatively small size of the outflows for all six of our objects casts doubts on their potency as a mechanism for negative AGN feedback.

The prominent broad Fe II emission blends in the spectra of active galactic nuclei have been shown to vary in response to continuum variations, but past attempts to measure the reverberation lag time of the optical Fe II lines have met with only limited success. Here we report the detection of Fe II reverberation in two Seyfert 1 galaxies, NGC 4593 and Mrk 1511, based on data from a program carried out at Lick Observatory in Spring 2011. Light curves for emission lines including Hβ and Fe II were measured by applying a fitting routine to decompose the spectra into several continuum and emission-line components, and we use crosscorrelation techniques to determine the reverberation lags of the emission lines relative to V -band light curves. In both cases the measured lag (τ cen ) of Fe II is longer than that of Hβ, although the inferred lags are somewhat sensitive to the choice of Fe II template used in the fit. For spectral decompositions done using the Fe II template of Véron-Cetty et al. (2004), we find τ cen (Fe II)/τ cen (Hβ) = 1.9 ± 0.6 in NGC 4593 and 1.5 ± 0.3 in Mrk 1511. The detection of highly correlated variations between Fe II and continuum emission demonstrates that the Fe II emission in these galaxies originates in photoionized gas, located predominantly in the outer portion of the broad-line region.

To investigate AGN outflows as a tracer of AGN feedback on star-formation, we perform integral-field spectroscopy of 20 type 2 AGNs at z<0.1, which are luminous AGNs with the [O III] luminosity >10 41.5 erg s −1 , and exhibit strong outflow signatures in the [O III] kinematics. By decomposing the emission-line profile, we obtain the maps of the narrow and broad components of [O III] and Hα lines, respectively. The broad components in both [O III] and Hα represent the non-gravitational kinematics, i.e., gas outflows, while the narrow components, especially in Hα, represent the gravitational kinematics, i.e., rotational disk. By using the integrated spectra within the flux-weighted size of the narrow-line region, we estimate the energetics of the gas outflows. The ionized gas mass is 1.0-38.5×105 M , and the mean mass outflow rate is 4.6±4.3 M yr −1 , which is a factor of ∼260 higher than the mean mass accretion rate 0.02±0.01 M yr −1 . The mean energy injection rate of the sample is 0.8±0.6% of the AGN bolometric luminosity, while the momentum flux is (5.4±3.6)×L bol /c on average, except for two most kinematically energetic AGNs with low L bol , which are possibly due to the dynamical timescale of the outflows. The estimated outflow energetics are consistent with the theoretical expectations for energy-conserving outflows from AGNs, yet we find no supporting evidence of instantaneous quenching of star formation due to the outflows.