BASS XLIV. Morphological preferences of local hard X-ray selected AGNs

galaxies: active; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: nuclei; Active galactic nuclei; All-sky; Control samples; Disk galaxies; Galaxies active; Galaxies:Nuclei; Galaxy evolution; Hard X ray; Morphological classifications; Spectroscopic surveys; Astronomy and Astrophysics; Space and Planetary Science; astro-ph.GA

Abstract :

[en] We present detailed morphological classifications for the hosts of 1189 hard X-ray selected (14–195 keV) active galactic nuclei (AGNs) from the Swift-BAT 105-month catalog as part of the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS). BASS provides a powerful all-sky census of nearby AGNs, minimizing obscuration biases and providing a robust dataset for studying AGN-host galaxy connections. Classifications are based on a volunteer-based visual inspection workflow on the Zooniverse platform, adapted from the Galaxy Zoo DECaLS (GZD) project. Dual-contrast grz color composite images, generated from public surveys (e.g., NOAO Legacy Survey, PanSTARRS, SDSS) and dedicated observations enabled key morphological features to be identified. Our analysis reveals that, with respect to a control sample of inactive galaxies, BASS AGN hosts show a deficiency of smooth elliptical galaxies (∼70%) and spiral galaxies with prominent arms (∼80%), while displaying an excess of mergers or disturbed systems (∼400%), and disk galaxies without a spiral structure (∼300%). These trends are found after controlling for redshift and i-band magnitude, which suggests a preference for AGN activity in gas-rich, dynamically disturbed environments or transitional disk systems. We also find a higher bar fraction among AGN hosts than in a control sample (∼50% vs. ∼30%). We further explore the relationships between AGN properties (e.g., X-ray luminosity, black hole mass, and Eddington ratio) and host morphology, and find that high-luminosity and high-accretion AGNs preferentially reside in smooth or point-like hosts. At the same time, lower-luminosity AGNs are more common in disk galaxies. These results underscore the importance of morphological studies in understanding the fueling and feedback mechanisms that drive AGN activity and their role in galaxy evolution. Our dataset provides a valuable benchmark for future multiwavelength surveys (e.g. LSST, Roman, and Euclid) and automated morphological classification efforts.

Disciplines :

Space science, astronomy & astrophysics

Author, co-author :

Tello, Miguel Parra ; Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Bauer, Franz E. ; Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá, Arica, Chile

De Cicco, Demetra ; Dipartimento di Fisica “Ettore Pancini”, Università di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy ; INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Napoli, Italy ; Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, MAS, Santiago de Chile, Chile

Doll, Goran ; Dipartimento di Fisica “Ettore Pancini”, Università di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy ; INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Napoli, Italy

Koss, Michael ; Eureka Scientific, Oakland, United States

Treister, Ezequiel ; Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá, Arica, Chile

Finlez, Carolina ; Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Troncoso, Marco ; Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Auge, Connor; Eureka Scientific, Oakland, United States

del Moral-Castro, I. ; Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

More authors (13 more)

Language :

English

Title :

BASS XLIV. Morphological preferences of local hard X-ray selected AGNs

Publication date :

2025

Journal title :

Astronomy and Astrophysics

ISSN :

0004-6361

eISSN :

1432-0746

Publisher :

EDP Sciences

Volume :

700

Pages :

A111

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202554990/pdf

Funding text :

We kindly thank the referee for the thorough reading of the manuscript and subsequent suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge funding from ANID - Millennium Science Initiative - AIM23-0001 and ICN12_009 (FEB), CATA-BASAL - FB210003 (FEB), and FONDECYT Regular \u2013 1241005 (MPT, FEB). DD acknowledges PON R&I 2021, CUP E65F21002880003, and Fondi di Ricerca di Ateneo (FRA), linea C, progetto TORNADO. CF acknowledges support from FONDECYT Postdoctoral grant \u2013 3220751. IMC acknowledges support from FONDECYT Postdoctoral grant 3230653. AC and JK acknowledge support by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), No. RS-2022-NR070872 and RS-2022-NR069020. KO acknowledges support from the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute under the R&D program (Project No. 2025-1-831-01), supervised by the Korea AeroSpace Administration, and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2025-00553982). This publication uses data generated via the Zooniverse.org platform, development of which is funded by generous support, including a Global Impact Award from Google, and by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Legacy Surveys consist of three individual and complementary projects: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS; Proposal ID #2014B-0404; PIs: David Schlegel and Arjun Dey), the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS; NOAO Prop. ID #2015A-0801; PIs: Zhou Xu and Xiaohui Fan), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS; Prop. ID #2016A-0453; PI: Arjun Dey). DECaLS, BASS and MzLS together include data obtained, respectively, at the Blanco telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF\u2019s NOIRLab; the Bok telescope, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona; and the Mayall telescope, Kitt Peak National Observatory, NOIRLab. Pipeline processing and analyses of the data were supported by NOIRLab and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The Legacy Surveys project is honored to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du\u2019ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O\u2019odham Nation. NOIRLab is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. LBNL is managed by the Regents of the University of California under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy. This project used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l\u2019Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Fisica d\u2019Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat Munchen and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NSF\u2019s NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. BASS is a key project of the Telescope Access Program (TAP), which has been funded by the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Strategic Priority Research Program \u201CThe Emergence of Cosmological Structures\u201D Grant # XDB09000000), and the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance. The BASS is also supported by the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant # 114A11KYSB20160057), and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (Grant # 12120101003, # 11433005). The Legacy Survey team makes use of data products from the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Legacy Surveys imaging of the DESI footprint is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH1123, by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract; and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to NOAO. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen\u2019s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This research uses services or data provided by the Astro Data Lab, which is part of the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) Program of NSF NOIRLab. NOIRLab is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Commentary :

20 pages, 24 figures. Accepted for publication on A&A

Available on ORBi :

since 19 May 2026

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