Oral Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

NGC7130: An Insight into Ionising sources of Composite Galaxies (#69)

Rebecca L Davies 1 , Jeffrey A Rich 2 , Lisa J Kewley 1 3 , Michael A Dopita 1 3 4
  1. RSAA, ANU, Weston, ACT, Australia
  2. Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, USA
  3. University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA
  4. King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

We use the Wide-Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) on the ANU 2.3m telescope to investigate the power sources of the composite activity in the luminous infrared galaxy NGC7130. We show that NGC7130 is a spectacularly clean case of starburst + AGN activity. We observe clear and distinct rings of gas ionised by increasing fractions of AGN activity towards the nucleus. We use our data to robustly estimate the relative contribution of star-formation and AGN activity to the EUV radiation field in NGC7130, and our integral field data allows us to estimate the radius of the narrow line region. This analysis paves the way for a large investigation into the power mechanisms responsible for the composite optical class of galaxies.