IA/U.Lisboa Seminar - Multi-wavelength Observations of Dual AGN (MODA) – the cases of Mrk463 and NGC6240 - 05 julho 2018

Nowadays, we know that most Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are observed to be triggered by internal, secular processes and minor galaxy mergers. Nevertheless, the most luminous AGN – quasars (QSOs) – are hosted by major mergers. In addition to that, AGN activity in mergers is seen to peak at nuclear separations shorter than 10kpc. Non-intuitively, the number of AGN pairs found at those distances (also known as dual AGN) are not frequently identified: only a few percent of mergers host such systems. Although technical limitations may play some role in this, system-intrinsic physical properties definitely will (e.g., AGN duty-cycle shorter than that of mergers; extreme nuclear obscuration; etc...). As a result, we are conducting the Multi-wavelength Observations of Dual AGN (MODA) survey targeting 17 known dual AGN systems at z<0.1 and aims to characterize their physical properties of the ionized, atomic, and molecular gas, as well as the dust. This presentation will present the results on Mrk463 reported by Treister et al. (2018), where optical, near-infrared and ALMA millimeter observations were brought together to reveal the large and small-scale properties of the system. Specifically, the evidence for a biconical outflow and ionized material outflowing at >600 km/s (a rate in rough balance with the molecular gas infalling onto the system), and an AGN-photoionized region indicating that the Eastern nucleus was up to 20 times more active in the past 10's thousand years. In addition, the current work being done toward NGC6240 will also be revealed, where ALMA data is resolving the gas bridging the two AGN nuclei down to ~25pc scales.