| Description |
Mechanical feedback from AGN-driven winds has been purported to play a central role in the evolution of galaxies. However, past searches for AGN winds have been heavily biased, selecting the brightest sources in bands affected either by obscuration and/or contamination from the host galaxy light, and incomplete, probing only the ionized gas phase of these winds. Remarkably, recent results from our group and others have demonstrated that the neutral and molecular components of AGN-driven winds often dominate the mass, and thus dynamics and energetics, of these winds. To address these limitations, we have been conducting an extensive multiwavelength campaign, including crucial spatially resolved optical neutral-gas absorption spectroscopy, of all AGN detected in the very hard X-rays (14-195 keV) by Swift-BAT. The Swift-BAT survey is the least biased all sky survey for AGN with respect to host galaxy properties and obscuration in the line-of-sight, and thus it is superior to past surveys for understanding the role of AGN-driven winds in galaxies. Here we request 35.3 hrs to obtain high-S/N OH 119 um spectra of all BAT-AGN within the Local Volume to characterize molecular gas in/outflows in these systems. A distance limit of <50 Mpc is selected to provide the best possible scale (<200 pc/arcsec) while also sampling the AGN luminosity function up to quasar-like values without favoring IR-bright systems due to the need for high-S/N data at virgul120 um. We will look for trends between the properties of OH 119 um (incidence of absorption, kinematics, column densities), the AGN (e.g., luminosity, accretion rate), and the host (e.g., morphology, star formation rate, extinction). In cases of kinematic match between OH features and spatially resolved neutral-gas clouds, we will be able to infer the masses and kinetic energies of these flows. Measured blueshifted velocities in excess of virgul1000 km/s or inferred mass outflow rates much larger than the star formation rates would be telltale signs of AGN-driven winds. |
