The environments of accreting supermassive black holes in the nearby Universe: A brief overview of the Southern Seyfert spectroscopic snapshot survey (S7)

Abstract

Black holes with a mass a million times the mass of our Sun or more—i.e., supermassive black holes—tend to reside in galactic centers. The mass of a supermassive black hole scales with the mass and stellar velocity dispersion of the bulge of the host galaxy. Thus, the central supermassive black hole in a galaxy appears to grow in conjunction with its host, but the physical mechanisms leading to such a coupling are not yet understood. Accreting supermassive black holes also comply with similar scaling relationships, which suggests that the accretion process plays an important role in the evolution of the host galaxy. We are exploring this question using a multiwavelength investigation of a sample of about 130 nearby southern galaxies that have accreting supermassive black holes. This study began as the Siding Spring Southern Seyfert Spectroscopic Snapshot Survey (S7), and we have obtained integral field spectroscopy for the central regions of all 130 of the galaxies. Radio- imaging follow-up work is ongoing, using the Giant Metre-Wave Radio Telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Several individual galaxies in our sample have been studied in detail as well. All of our data are intended for public release, with the first two releases already done. We present a brief status report of our investigation.