Paper detail

Optical spectroscopy of type-2 LINERs

Type-2 Low-ionization Narrow Emission-line Regions (LINERs) have been optically classified with the Palomar data as not presenting a broad component in the Balmer emission lines associated to the Broad Line Region (BLR) of the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). We unveil the presence of different kinematic components of emission lines in the nuclear region of a sample of local (z$\leq$0.022) type-2 LINERs. We focus on the analysis of their true nature by means of the detection (or not) of a broad component originated in the BLR. Additionally, we search for the possible presence of non-rotational motions such as outflows. We have applied a decomposition of the nuclear emission lines using a spectroscopic analysis of the optical spectra of 9 type-2 LINERs of intermediate-resolution data retrieved from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) archive. The study is completed with archival spectra from the Double Spectrograph from the Palomar Observatory. The emission line fitting reveals the presence of a broad component associated to the BLR in 6 out of the 9 galaxies for the space-based data, and for 2 out of the 8 from the ground-based spectra. The velocity dispersion of two galaxies (NGC 4486 and NGC 4594) measured in HST/STIS data suggest the presence of outflows. The results indicate that the spatial resolution plays a major role in the detection of the BLR, as it appears diluted in the ground-based data (even after removing stellar contribution). This is also true for the emission line diagnostics, as the contaminant light contributes to lower emission line ratios towards the star-forming area of standard BPTs. We propose to reclassify NGC4594 as a type-1 LINER, since a BLR component is seen in both space- and ground-based spectra. We find ambiguous results for the BLR component of NGC 4486. The modest outflow detection in our sample may indicate that they are not as frequent as for type-1 LINERs.