A low-luminosity type-1 QSO sample - A morphological study of nearby AGN
  hosts
  There is growing evidence that every galaxy with a considerable spheroidal
component hosts a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center. Strong
correlations between the SMBH and the spheroidal component suggest a physical
connection through a coevolutionary scenario. For very massive galaxies a
merger-driven scenario is preferred, resulting in elliptical galaxies. In the
nearby universe, we find many disk galaxies, showing no signs of recent
interaction. Alternative secular evolutionary scenarios for such galaxies
involve internal triggers like bars and spiral arms or minor mergers. We
analyze a sample of 99 nearby galaxies (0.02 < z < 0.06) from the Hamburg/ESO
survey in order to get insight into structural and dynamical properties of the
hosts to trace the origin of the bulge-SMBH correlation. In this work, we first
collect images of sample members to get an impression of the morphological
distribution in the sample. In a second step, we start to analyze sensitive,
high resolution near-infrared images of 20 galaxies, performing aperture
photometry and bulge-disk decomposition with the BUDDA code. We find an
unexpected high fraction of barred galaxies and many other structural
peculiarities.
