The Seyfert Population in the Local Universe^*

The magnitude-limited catalog of the Southern Sky Redshift Survey (SSRS2) is used to characterize the properties of galaxies hosting active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Using emission-line ratios, we identify a total of 162 (3%) Seyfert galaxies out of the parent sample with 5399 galaxies. The sample contains 121 Seyfert 2 galaxies and 41 Seyfert 1 galaxies. The SSRS2 Seyfert galaxies are predominantly in spirals of types Sb and earlier or in galaxies with perturbed appearance as the result of strong interactions or mergers. Seyfert galaxies in this sample are twice as common in barred hosts as the non-Seyfert galaxies. By assigning galaxies to groups using a percolation algorithm, we find that the Seyfert galaxies in the SSRS2 are more likely to be found in binary systems when compared with galaxies in the SSRS2 parent sample. However, there is no statistically significant difference between the Seyfert and SSRS2 parent sample when systems with more than two galaxies are considered. The analysis of the present sample suggests that there is a stronger correlation between the presence of the AGN phenomenon with internal properties of galaxies (morphology, presence of bar, luminosity) than with environmental effects (local galaxy density, group velocity dispersion, nearest neighbor distance).