The inner workings of early-type galaxies: cores, nuclei and supermassive black holes

Mathematics – Logic

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Stellar and gas dynamical studies in an ever-increasing number of galaxies have established that many --- and perhaps all --- luminous galaxies contain central supermassive black holes (SBHs). Following the discovery that the SBH masses correlate with various properties of the host galaxy --- such as bulge luminosity, mass, velocity dispersion, light concentration, and halo circular velocity --- it has become widely accepted that SBH and galaxy formation are closely entwined. Most recently, imaging surveys with the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that 50 to 80% of low- and intermediate-luminosity galaxies contain a compact stellar nucleus at their center, regardless of host galaxy morphological type. This contribution explores the connection between stellar nuclei, SBHs and host galaxies. Using data for a large, representative sample of early-type galaxies in the Virgo cluster , obtained as part of the ACS Virgo cluster Survey (ACSVCS), the masses of compact stellar nuclei are shown to obey a tight correlation with the masses of the host galaxies. The same correlation is obeyed by SBHs found in predominantly massive galaxies. One possibile interpretation of these results is that a generic by-product of galaxy formation is the creation of a "central massive object" (CMO) --- either a SBH or a compact stellar nucleus --- that contains a mean fraction, ˜0.2%, of the total galactic mass. In galaxies with masses greater than a few tens of billion of solar masses, SBHs might be the dominant mode of CMO formation.

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