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Light Cores Behind Dark Masks

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Galaxies and their Masks

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Abstract

The dusty circumnuclear environments of many spiral galaxies hide important clues for understanding the tight correlation between the supermassive black hole and the host galaxy bulge mass. Two of the nearest spiral galaxies with nuclear starburst host off-centered compact cores associated with the peak of the infrared emission.These compact objects are lightweight, up to a few million solar masses. Their locations imply that they are triggering the present star formation within the circumnuclear disk. Numerical modeling implies that the giant star clusters formed in the process evaporate in a few system revolutions (due to the strong asymmetric gravitational potential). Therefore the off-center compact object scenario provides a model in which the dynamically cold gaseous component is rapidly converted into a dynamically hot stellar component. Meanwhile only a small fraction of the gas contributes to the growth of the off-centered compact object.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of MINCYT (Argentina) and CAPES (Brazil), a grant by CONICET (PIP 5097), and the Gemini time allocations GS-2003A-Q-17, GS-2007A-DD- 17, and GS-2009B-Q-39. The Gemini Observatory is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership, consisting of the NSF (USA), STFC (United Kingdom), NRC (Canada), ARC (Australia), MINCYT (Argentina), CNPq (Brazil), and CONICYT (Chile). CIRPASS was provided and supported by the Instrumentation Group at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. We have also used Chandra and HST archival data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gemini Observatory, AURA, Colina El Pino, La Serena, Chile

    Ruben J. Díaz

Authors
  1. Ruben J. Díaz
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  2. Damián Mast
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  3. Germán Gimeno
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  4. Horacio Dottori
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  5. Irapuan Rodrigues
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  6. María Paz Agüero
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  7. Peter Pessev
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ruben J. Díaz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of the Witwatersrand, Johanne, School of Computational and Applied Math, Wits, 2050, South Africa

    David L. Block

  2. Mount Stromlo Observatory, Australian National University, Cotter Rd., Weston Creek, 2611, Aust Capital Terr, Australia

    Kenneth C. Freeman

  3. Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica,, Calle Luis Enrique Erro 1, Santa Maria Tonantzintla, 72840, Puebla, Mexico

    Ivânio Puerari

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Díaz, R.J. et al. (2010). Light Cores Behind Dark Masks. In: Block, D., Freeman, K., Puerari, I. (eds) Galaxies and their Masks. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7317-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7317-7_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-7316-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-7317-7

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