Deep within galaxies like the Milky Way, astronomers have found a fascinating legacy of Einstein's general theory of relativity: supermassive black holes. Connected to the evolution of the galaxies ...that contain these black holes, galactic nuclei are the sites of uniquely energetic events, including quasars, stellar tidal disruptions, and the generation of gravitational waves. This textbook is the first comprehensive introduction to dynamical processes occurring in the vicinity of supermassive black holes in their galactic environment. Filling a critical gap, it is an authoritative resource for astrophysics and physics graduate students, and researchers focusing on galactic nuclei, the astrophysics of massive black holes, galactic dynamics, and gravitational wave detection. It is an ideal text for an advanced graduate-level course on galactic nuclei and as supplementary reading in graduate-level courses on high-energy astrophysics and galactic dynamics. David Merritt summarizes the theoretical work of the last three decades on the evolution of galactic nuclei, the formation of massive black holes, and the interaction between black holes and stars. He explores in depth such important topics as observations of galactic nuclei, dynamical models, weighing black holes, motion near supermassive black holes, evolution of nuclei due to gravitational encounters, loss cone theory, and binary supermassive black holes. Self-contained and up-to-date, the textbook includes a summary of the current literature and previously unpublished work by the author. For researchers working on active galactic nuclei, galaxy evolution, and the generation of gravitational waves, this book will be an essential resource.
It has long been speculated that many starburst or compact dwarf galaxies are resulted from dwarf-dwarf galaxy merging, but unequivocal evidence for this possibility has rarely been reported in the ...literature. We present the first study of deep optical broadband images of a gas-dominated blue compact dwarf galaxy (BCD) VCC 848 (M 2 × 108M ) that hosts extended stellar shells and thus is confirmed to be a dwarf-dwarf merger. VCC 848 is located in the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster. By analyzing the stellar light distribution, we found that VCC 848 is the result of a merging between two dwarf galaxies with a primary-to-secondary mass ratio 5 for the stellar components and 2 for the presumed dark matter halos. The secondary progenitor galaxy has been almost entirely disrupted. The age-mass distribution of photometrically selected star cluster candidates in VCC 848 implies that the cluster formation rate (CFR, ∝ star formation rate) was enhanced by a factor of ∼7-10 during the past ∼1 Gyr. The merging-induced enhancement of CFR peaked near the galactic center a few hundred Myr ago and has started declining in the last few tens of Myr. The current star formation activities, as traced by the youngest clusters, mainly occur at large galactocentric distances ( 1 kpc). The fact that VCC 848 is still (atomic) gas-dominated after the period of the most violent collision suggests that gas-rich dwarf galaxy merging can result in BCD-like remnants with extended atomic gas distribution surrounding a blue compact center, in general agreement with previous numerical simulations.
ABSTRACT
The (α/Fe, Fe/H) distribution of Milky Way stars shows at least two distinct sequences, which have traditionally been associated with the thin and thick disc components. The abundance ...distribution varies systematically with location R and |z| across the Galaxy. We reproduce this using an analytical chemodynamical model that includes the effects of radial migration and kinematic heating. Unlike some earlier models, our scheme does not require a distinct thick disc component emerging from a separate evolutionary path. The proposed model has a continuous star formation history and a continuous age velocity dispersion relation. Moreover, α/Fe is constant for stellar ages less than 8 Gyr, but increases sharply for older stars over a time-scale of 1.5 Gyr. The gap between the two sequences is due to this sharp transition. We show that the high-α/Fe sequence at the low-metallicity end is simply a pile-up of old stars, but towards the high-metallicity end, the age progressively decreases and stars have small birth radii. Our model successfully explains the uniformity of the locus of the high-α/Fe sequence across different locations. The low-α/Fe sequence contains stars with different birth radii that owes its existence to radial migration. For the low-α/Fe stars, angular momentum is anticorrelated with Fe/H, while the opposite is true for high-α/Fe stars. We show that the later trend can be explained by the increase of circular velocity with time. If radial migration is not included, the model fails to generate the double sequence and instead shows only a single sequence. Our simple scheme has major advantages over earlier chemodynamical models, as we show.
Gaia Data Release 3 de Laverny, P.; Spagna, A.; Vallenari, A. ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
06/2023, Volume:
674
Journal Article, Web Resource
Peer reviewed
Open access
Context.
The motion of stars has been used to reveal details of the complex history of the Milky Way, in constant interaction with its environment. Nevertheless, to reconstruct the Galactic history ...puzzle in its entirety, the chemo-physical characterisation of stars is essential. Previous
Gaia
data releases were supported by a smaller, heterogeneous, and spatially biased mixture of chemical data from ground-based observations.
Aims.
Gaia
Data Release 3 opens a new era of all-sky spectral analysis of stellar populations thanks to the nearly 5.6 million stars observed by the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) and parametrised by the GSP-Spec module. In this work, we aim to demonstrate the scientific quality of
Gaia
’s Milky Way chemical cartography through a chemo-dynamical analysis of disc and halo populations.
Methods.
Stellar atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances provided by
Gaia
DR3 spectroscopy are combined with DR3 radial velocities and EDR3 astrometry to analyse the relationships between chemistry and Milky Way structure, stellar kinematics, and orbital parameters.
Results.
The all-sky
Gaia
chemical cartography allows a powerful and precise chemo-dynamical view of the Milky Way with unprecedented spatial coverage and statistical robustness. First, it reveals the strong vertical symmetry of the Galaxy and the flared structure of the disc. Second, the observed kinematic disturbances of the disc – seen as phase space correlations – and kinematic or orbital substructures are associated with chemical patterns that favour stars with enhanced metallicities and lower
α
/Fe abundance ratios compared to the median values in the radial distributions. This is detected both for young objects that trace the spiral arms and older populations. Several
α
, iron-peak elements and at least one heavy element trace the thin and thick disc properties in the solar cylinder. Third, young disc stars show a recent chemical impoverishment in several elements. Fourth, the largest chemo-dynamical sample of open clusters analysed so far shows a steepening of the radial metallicity gradient with age, which is also observed in the young field population. Finally, the
Gaia
chemical data have the required coverage and precision to unveil galaxy accretion debris and heated disc stars on halo orbits through their
α
/Fe ratio, and to allow the study of the chemo-dynamical properties of globular clusters.
Conclusions.
Gaia
DR3 chemo-dynamical diagnostics open new horizons before the era of ground-based wide-field spectroscopic surveys. They unveil a complex Milky Way that is the outcome of an eventful evolution, shaping it to the present day.
Full text
Available for:
FMFMET, NUK, UL, UM, UPUK
Holm 15A, the brightest cluster galaxy of the galaxy cluster Abell 85, has an ultradiffuse central region, ∼ 2 mag fainter than the faintest depleted core of any early-type galaxy (ETG) that has been ...dynamically modeled in detail. We use orbit-based, axisymmetric Schwarzschild models to analyze the stellar kinematics of Holm 15A from new high-resolution, wide-field spectral observations obtained with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer at the Very Large Telescope. We find a supermassive black hole with a mass of ( 4.0 0.80 ) × 10 10 M at the center of Holm 15A. This is the most massive black hole with a direct dynamical detection in the local universe. We find that the distribution of stellar orbits is increasingly biased toward tangential motions inside the core. However, the tangential bias is less than that in other cored elliptical galaxies. We compare Holm 15A with N-body simulations of mergers between galaxies with black holes and find that the observed amount of tangential anisotropy and the shape of the light profile are consistent with a formation scenario where Holm 15A is the remnant of a merger between two ETGs with pre-existing depleted cores. We find that black hole masses in cored galaxies, including Holm 15A, scale inversely with the central stellar surface brightness and mass density. These correlations are independent of a specific parameterization of the light profile.
We present rotation curve fits to 175 late-type galaxies from the Spitzer Photometry and Accurate Rotation Curves database using seven dark matter (DM) halo profiles: pseudo-isothermal, Burkert, ...Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW), Einasto, Di Cintio et al. (2014, hereafter DC14), cored-NFW, and a new semi-empirical profile named Lucky13. We marginalize over the stellar mass-to-light ratio, galaxy distance, disk inclination, halo concentration, and halo mass (and an additional shape parameter for Einasto) using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. We find that cored halo models, such as the DC14 and Burkert profiles, generally provide better fits to rotation curves than the cuspy NFW profile. The stellar mass-halo mass relation from abundance matching is recovered by all halo profiles once imposed as a Bayesian prior, whereas the halo mass-concentration relation is not reproduced in detail by any halo model. We provide an extensive set of figures as well as best-fit parameters in machine-readable tables to facilitate model comparison and the exploration of DM halo properties.
We use the kinematics of ∼200 000 giant stars that lie within ∼1.5 kpc of the plane to measure the vertical profile of mass density near the Sun. We find that the dark mass contained within the ...isodensity surface of the dark halo that passes through the Sun ((6 ± 0.9) × 1010 M⊙), and the surface density within 0.9 kpc of the plane ((69 ± 10) M⊙ pc−2) are almost independent of the (oblate) halo's axis ratio q. If the halo is spherical, 46 per cent of the radial force on the Sun is provided by baryons, and only 4.3 per cent of the Galaxy's mass is baryonic. If the halo is flattened, the baryons contribute even less strongly to the local radial force and to the Galaxy's mass. The dark matter density at the location of the Sun is 0.0126 q
−0.89 M⊙ pc−3 = 0.48 q
−0.89 GeV cm−3. When combined with other literature results we find hints for a mildly oblate dark halo with q ≃ 0.8. Our value for the dark mass within the solar radius is larger than that predicted by cosmological dark-matter-only simulations but in good agreement with simulations once the effects of baryonic infall are taken into account. Our mass models consist of three double-exponential discs, an oblate bulge and a Navarro–Frenk–White dark matter halo, and we model the dynamics of the RAVE (RAdial Velocity Experiment) stars in the corresponding gravitational fields by finding distribution functions f J
that depend on three action integrals. Statistical errors are completely swamped by systematic uncertainties, the most important of which are the distance to the stars in the photometric and spectroscopic samples and the solar distance to the Galactic Centre. Systematics other than the flattening of the dark halo yield overall uncertainties ∼15 per cent.
We report two secure ( ) and one tentative (z 3.767) spectroscopic confirmations of massive and quiescent galaxies through K-band observations with Keck/MOSFIRE and Very Large Telescope/X-Shooter. ...The stellar continuum emission, absence of strong nebular emission lines, and lack of significant far-infrared detections confirm the passive nature of these objects, disfavoring the alternative solution of low-redshift dusty star-forming interlopers. We derive stellar masses of log(M /M ) ∼ 11 and ongoing star formation rates placing these galaxies 1-2 dex below the main sequence at their redshifts. The adopted parameterization of the star formation history suggests that these sources experienced a strong ( M yr−1) and short (∼50 Myr) burst of star formation, peaking ∼150-500 Myr before the time of observation, all properties reminiscent of the characteristics of submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) at z > 4. We investigate this connection by comparing the comoving number densities and the properties of these two populations. We find a fair agreement only with the deepest submillimeter surveys detecting not only the most extreme starbursts but also more normal galaxies. We support these findings by further exploring the Illustris TNG cosmological simulation, retrieving populations of both fully quenched massive galaxies at z ∼ 3-4 and SMGs at z ∼ 4−5, with number densities and properties in agreement with the observations at z ∼ 3 but in increasing tension at higher redshift. Nevertheless, as suggested by the observations, not all of the progenitors of quiescent galaxies at these redshifts shine as bright SMGs in their past, and, similarly, not all bright SMGs quench by z ∼ 3, both fractions depending on the threshold assumed to define the SMGs themselves.
ABSTRACT
Stellar radial migration plays an important role in reshaping a galaxy’s structure and the radial distribution of stellar population properties. In this work, we revisit reported ...observational evidence for radial migration and quantify its strength using the age–Fe/H distribution of stars across the Milky Way with APOGEE data. We find a broken age–Fe/H relation in the Galactic disc at r > 6 kpc, with a more pronounced break at larger radii. To quantify the strength of radial migration, we assume stars born at each radius have a unique age and metallicity, and then decompose the metallicity distribution function (MDF) of mono-age young populations into different Gaussian components that originated from various birth radii at rbirth < 13 kpc. We find that, at ages of 2 and 3 Gyr, roughly half the stars were formed within 1 kpc of their present radius, and very few stars (<5 per cent) were formed more than 4 kpc away from their present radius. These results suggest limited short-distance radial migration and inefficient long-distance migration in the Milky Way during the last 3 Gyr. In the very outer disc beyond 15 kpc, the observed age–Fe/H distribution is consistent with the prediction of pure radial migration from smaller radii, suggesting a migration origin of the very outer disc. We also estimate intrinsic metallicity gradients at ages of 2 and 3 Gyr of −0.061 and −0.063 dex kpc−1, respectively.
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