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Description
We used a large, homogeneous sample of 4178 z<=0.8 Seyfert 1 galaxies and QSOs selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate the strength of FeII emission and its correlation with other emission lines and physical parameters of active galactic nuclei. We find that the strongest correlations of almost all the emission-line intensity ratios and equivalent widths (EWs) are with the Eddington ratio (L/L_Edd_), rather than with the continuum luminosity at 5100{AA} (L_5100_) or black hole mass (M_BH_); the only exception is the EW of ultraviolet FeII emission, which does not correlate at all with broad-line width, L_5100_, M_BH_, or L/L_Edd_. By contrast, the intensity ratios of both the ultraviolet and optical FeII emission to MgII{lambda}2800 correlate quite strongly with L/L_Edd_. Interestingly, among all the emission lines in the near-UV and optical studied in this paper (including MgII{lambda}2800, H{beta}, and [OIII]{lambda}5007), the EW of narrow optical FeII emission has the strongest correlation with L/L_Edd_. We hypothesize that the variation of the emission-line strength in active galaxies is regulated by L/L_Edd_ because it governs the global distribution of the hydrogen column density of the clouds gravitationally bound in the line-emitting region, as well as its overall gas supply. The systematic dependence on L/L_Edd_ must be corrected when using the FeII/MgII intensity ratio as a measure of the Fe/Mg abundance ratio to study the history of chemical evolution in QSO environments.
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