Nature or nurture? The relationship between star formation and AGN activity in NGC7130
Rebecca Davies (Australian National University)
We use the Wide-Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) on the ANU 2.3m telescope to investigate the power sources of the composite activity in the luminous infrared galaxy NGC7130. We show that NGC7130 is a spectacularly clean case of starburst + AGN activity. We observe clear and distinct rings of gas ionised by increasing fractions of AGN activity towards the nucleus. We use our data to robustly estimate the relative contribution of star-formation and AGN activity to the EUV radiation field in NGC7130, and our integral field data allows us to estimate the radius of the narrow line region. The next step in this line of research is to determine whether the observed mixing properties are the result of nature or of nurture – in particular, whether or not star formation properties change considerably as a function of AGN properties or whether they simply reflect the conditions in the ISM. This analysis paves the way for large scale investigation of the starburst-AGN connection using current and future IFU surveys.