PAH features within few hundred parsecs of active galactic nuclei

Abstract

Spectral features from PAH molecules observed in the mid-IR range are typically used to infer the amount of recent and ongoing star formation (SF) on kpc scales around AGN where more traditional methods fail. This assumes that the observed PAH features are excited predominantly by SF. With current ground-based telescopes and the upcoming JWST, much smaller spatial scales can be probed and we aim at testing this assumption in the range of few tens to few hundreds of pc. For that, we spatially map the emitted 11.3μm PAH surface flux as a function of distance from 0.4-4 arcsec from the centre in 28 nearby AGN using ground-based high-angular resolution mid-IR spectroscopy. We detect and extract the 11.3μm PAH feature in 13 AGN. The fluxes within each aperture are scaled to a luminosity-normalised distance from the nucleus to be able to compare intrinsic spatial scales of AGN radiation spanning about 2 orders of magnitude in luminosity. For this, we establish an empirical relation between the absorption-corrected X-ray luminosity and the sublimation radius in these sources. Once normalised, the radial profiles of the emitted PAH surface flux show similar radial slopes, with a power-law index of approximately -1.1, and similar absolute values, consistent within a factor of a few of each other as expected from the uncertainty in the intrinsic scale estimate. We interpret this as evidence that the profiles are caused by a common compact central physical process, either the AGN itself or circumnuclear SF linked in strength to the AGN power. A photoionisation-based model of an AGN exciting dense clouds in its environment can reproduce the observed radial slope and confirms that the AGN radiation field is strong enough to explain the observed PAH surface fluxes within ~10-500 pc of the nucleus. Our results advice caution in the use of PAH emission as a SF tracer within a kpc around AGN.