GOALS-JWST: Gas Dynamics and Excitation in NGC 7469 Revealed by NIRSpec

Creators: Bianchin, Marina; U, Vivian; Song, Yiqing; Lai 賴, Thomas S.-Y. 劭愉; Remigio, Raymond P.; Barcos-Muñoz, Loreto; Díaz-Santos, Tanio; Armus, Lee¹; Inami, Hanae; Larson, Kirsten L.; Evans, Aaron S.; Böker, Torsten; Kader, Justin A.; Linden, Sean T.; Charmandaris, Vassilis; Malkan, Matthew A.; Rich, Jeff; Bohn, Thomas; Medling, Anne M.; Stierwalt, Sabrina; Mazzarella, Joseph M.; Law, David R.; Privon, George C.; Aalto, Susanne; Appleton, Philip; Brown, Michael J. I.; Buiten, Victorine A.; Finnerty, Luke; Hayward, Christopher C.; Howell, Justin; Iwasawa, Kazushi; Kemper, Francisca; Marshall, Jason; McKinney, Jed; Müller-Sánchez, Francisco; Murphy, Eric J.; van der Werf, Paul P.; Sanders, David B.; Surace, Jason

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We present new JWST NIRSpec integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data for the luminous infrared galaxy NGC 7469, a nearby (70.6 Mpc) active galaxy with a Seyfert 1.5 nucleus that drives a highly ionized gas outflow and a prominent nuclear star-forming ring. Using the superb sensitivity and high spatial resolution of the JWST instrument NIRSpec IFS, we investigate the role of the Seyfert nucleus in the excitation and dynamics of the circumnuclear gas. Our analysis focuses on the [Fe ii], H₂, and hydrogen recombination lines that trace the radiation/shocked-excited molecular and ionized interstellar medium around the active galactic nucleus (AGN). We investigate gas excitation through H₂/Brγ and [Fe ii]/Paβ emission line ratios and find that photoionization by the AGN dominates within the central 300 pc of the galaxy except in a small region that shows signatures of shock-heated gas; these shock-heated regions are likely associated with a compact radio jet. In addition, the velocity field and velocity dispersion maps reveal complex gas kinematics. Rotation is the dominant feature, but we also identify noncircular motions consistent with gas inflows as traced by the velocity residuals and the spiral pattern in the Paα velocity dispersion map. The inflow is 2 orders of magnitude higher than the AGN accretion rate. The compact nuclear radio jet has enough power to drive the highly ionized outflow. This scenario suggests that the inflow and outflow are in a self-regulating feeding–feedback process, with a contribution from the radio jet helping to drive the outflow.

Copyright and License

© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. 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 author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank Sandra Raimundo and Rogemar A. Riffel for discussions that added to the interpretations in the paper. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program #JWST-ERS-01328 and can be accessed via DOI:10.17909/w7ea-wx90. Research at UCI by M.B. and V.U. was supported by funding from program #JWST-GO-01717, which was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. V.U. further acknowledges partial funding support from NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) grants #80NSSC20K0450 and #80NSSC23K0750, and HST grants #HST-AR-17063.005-A and #HST-GO-17285.001-A, and had partially performed work for this project at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-2210452. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. H.I. and T.B. acknowledge support from JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP21H01129 and the Ito Foundation for Promotion of Science. A.M.M. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under grant No. 2009416. A.S.E. and S.L. acknowledge support from NASA grant HST-GO15472. Y.S. was funded in part by the NSF through the Grote Reber Fellowship Program administered by Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. S.A. gratefully acknowledges support from ERC Advanced grant 789410, from the Swedish Research Council, and from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg (KAW) Foundation. S.T.L. was partially supported thorough NASA grant HST-GO16914. K.I. acknowledges support by the Spanish MCIN under grant PID2019 105510GBC33/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. F.M.-S. acknowledges support from NASA through ADAP award 80NSSC19K1096. This work was also partly supported by the Spanish program Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2020-001058-M, financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Finally, this research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Facilities

JWST (NIRSpec IFU and NIRCam) - , HST (WFC3) - , MAST - , NED -

Software References

Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), IFSCUBE (Ruschel-Dutra & Dall'Agnol De Oliveira 2020; Ruschel-Dutra et al. 2021), JWST Science Calibration (Bushouse et al. 2022), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), QFitsView (Ott 2012), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020)

Additional Information

Focus on Early Results from GOALS-JWST

Files

Bianchin_2024_ApJ_965_103.pdf

Files (1.2 MB)

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes