A Search for Near Infrared H_2 Emission in Active Elliptical Galaxies

Physics

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Hst Proposal Id #7862 Agn And Quasars

Scientific paper

We propose to use NICMOS Camera 2 to obtain narrow band H_2 v=1-0 S{1} {Lambda = 2.1218 Mum} and continuum images of three radio elliptical galaxies for which cycle 5 and cycle 6 WFPC2 images have revealed the presence of small {200 parsec} nuclear disks of dust and gas. The aim of this proposal is twofold: 1} by mapping the distribution of the molecular gas, gain further insights on the nature of the nuclear dust disks that lurk in the cores of 30 ellipticals, and 2} by looking for unresolved H_2 emission at the nuclear location, search for direct evidence of the presence of a parsec scale dusty torus in radio ellipticals: the torus is hypothesized to surround the central hot accretion disk and massive black hole, and although its presence is critical for the unification models of AGNs, direct evidence of its existence is available only for Seyferts, but not for radio ellipticals. Six orbits for each galaxy will allow us to detect emission line features with a surface brightness of 10^-16 erg cm^-2 s^-1 arcsec^-2 and a S/N of 7 in the continuum subtracted emission line images. An additional orbit per galaxy will be spent to obtain broad band J, H and K images.

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