The Keck/OSIRIS Nearby AGN Survey (KONA) - I. The nuclear K-band properties of nearby AGN

We introduce the Keck Osiris Nearby AGN survey (KONA), a new adaptive optics-assisted integral-field spectroscopic survey of Seyfert galaxies. KONA permits at ~0.1" resolution a detailed study of the nuclear kinematic structure of gas and stars in a representative sample of 40 local bona fide active galactic nucleus (AGN). KONA seeks to characterize the physical processes responsible for the coevolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies, principally inflows and outflows. With these IFU data of the nuclear regions of 40 Seyfert galaxies, the KONA survey will be able to study, for the first time, a number of key topics with meaningful statistics. In this paper we study the nuclear K-band properties of nearby AGN. We find that the luminosities of the unresolved Seyfert 1 sources at 2.1 microns are correlated with the hard X-ray luminosities, implying that the majority of the emission is non-stellar. The best-fit correlation is logLK = 0.9logL2-10 keV + 4 over 3 orders of magnitude in both K-band and X-ray luminosities. We find no strong correlation between 2.1 microns luminosity and hard X-ray luminosity for the Seyfert 2 galaxies. The spatial extent and spectral slope of the Seyfert 2 galaxies indicate the presence of nuclear star formation and attenuating material (gas and dust), which in some cases is compact and in some galaxies extended. We detect coronal-line emission in 36 galaxies and for the first time in five galaxies. Finally, we find 4/20 galaxies that are optically classified as Seyfert 2 show broad emission lines in the near-IR, and one galaxy (NGC 7465) shows evidence of a double nucleus.