Mergers in Double-Peaked [O III] Active Galactic Nuclei

Understand

As a natural consequence of galaxy mergers, binary active galactic nuclei (AGNs) should be commonplace.

• Nevertheless, observational confirmations are rare, especially for binaries with separations less than ten kpc.
• Such a system may show two sets of narrow emission lines in a single spectrum owing to the orbital motion of the binary.
• We have obtained high-resolution near-infrared images of 50 double-peaked [O III] 5007 AGNs with the Keck II laser guide star adaptive optics system.