Chemical abundances in Seyfert galaxies – VI. Empirical abundance calibration

We derived a bi-dimensional calibration between the emission-line ratios R23 =([OII]λ3726+λ3729+[OIII]λ4959+ λ5007)/H β , P = [([O III] λ4959 + λ5007)/H β ]/R23 and the oxygen abundance relative to hydrogen (O/H) in the gas phase of Seyfert 1 and 2 nuclei. In view of this, emission-line intensity ratios for a sample of objects taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 measured by the MPA/JHU group and direct estimates of O/H based on Te-method, adapted for active galactic nuclei (AGNs), are considered. We find no variation of R23 observed along the radii of AGNs, which shows that this line ratio is a good oxygen abundance (O/H) indicator for the class of objects considered in this work. The derived O/H = f(R23, P) relation produces O/H values similar to estimations via Te-method in a wide range of metallicities [8.0 < 12 + log (O/H) < 9.2]. Conversely to star-forming regions in the high-metallicity regime, R23 shows a positive correlation trend with O/H in AGNs. This indicates that the hardness of ionizing radiation is not affected by the metallicities in these objects or narrow-line regions are not significantly modified by changes in the spectral energy distribution due to metallicity variations.