Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2000-03-13
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
5 pages, 2 figures, uses AASTeX502 Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters
Scientific paper
10.1086/312822
The twin peaks in the nucleus of M31 have been interpreted by Tremaine as a thick, eccentric, disk of stars orbiting a massive dark object; the required alignment of the apoapsides of the stellar orbits could be maintained by self-gravity, and the whole structure might be a discrete, nonlinear eigenmode. The pattern speed of this mode could, in principle, be determined by the Tremaine-Weinberg (TW) method, which requires measurements of the surface brightness, and radial velocity along a strip parallel to the line of nodes. However, spectroscopic observations along the line of nodes are not available. We propose a variant of the TW method, which exploits a basic feature of the eccentric disk model, to extract estimates of the pattern speed from {\it Hubble Space Telescope} spectroscopic data, taken along the line joining the two peaks. Within limitations imposed by the data, we estimate that the pattern rotates in a prograde manner and, for an assumed disk inclination of $77^{\circ}$, the pattern speed $|\Omega_p| < 30 {\rm km s^{-1} pc^{-1}}$, or period more than $200,000$ years.
Sambhus Niranjan
Sridhar Srinath
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