Tuesday

In recent years there have been conflicting observations over whether or not the host galaxies of type 1 and 2 active galactic nuclei (AGN) are found in like environments, inevitably questioning the validity of the AGN unification model proposed by Antonucci (1993). We exploit the spectroscopic completeness of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey (GAMA) to conduct a rigorous comparative environmental analysis of type 1 and 2 AGN. We select a high-fidelity sample of optical AGN at low redshift and investigate their likelihood to have neighbouring galaxies out to a separation 350kpc/h. Furthermore, we probe the properties of those neighbours in terms of colour and star-formation rates in order to test the observations of Villarroel & Korn (2014). We observe a potential excess of type 2 AGN in galaxy pairs separated by less than 20kpc/h, relative to type 1 and inactive galaxies, in line with the observations of Koulouridis et al. (2006) and Jiang et al. (2016). We fail to reproduce the difference in neighbour properties with AGN type observed by Villarroel & Korn (2014). Our observations are consistent with AGN unification where close interaction may increase the covering factor of the dusty torus associated with the nucleus.