Accretion discs in active galactic nuclei - Tell-tale signs of the nuclear star cluster?

Details Accretion discs in active galactic nuclei - Tell-tale signs of the nuclear star cluster? Accretion discs in active galactic nuclei - Tell-tale signs of the nuclear star cluster?

Jan 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993mnras.260..437p&link_type=abstract

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (ISSN 0035-8711), vol. 260, no. 2, p. 437-452.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

20

Accretion Disks, Active Galactic Nuclei, Black Holes (Astronomy), Spatial Distribution, Star Clusters, Stellar Mass, Digital Simulation, Luminosity

Scientific paper

Early theories of active galactic nuclei concentrated on the physics of gas in the region dominated by the gravitational potential of a central black hole. Recently, attention has increasingly focussed on the role of individual stars in the environment of an active galactic nucleus. We investigate some aspects of accretion disc structure in active galactic nuclei containing a gravitationally significant stellar component. Because such discs radiate the gravitational binding energy released locally by viscous processes, their spectra probe the mass distributions of the regions where the discs reside. In this paper, we address the questions: what would the spectral signature of the central star cluster be; are these features observable, and under what conditions will a cluster be detectable? We show that the stellar cluster surrounding the central hole can significantly alter the spectrum of a disc embedded in a realistic potential well if the cluster is very compact or very young. The signature of a cluster will probably be a thermal bump in the infrared region. If the feature at 1070 K in the spectrum of 3C 273 is indeed due to the nuclear stellar cluster, then we can show that the spectrum implies a black hole mass of Mh = 10 exp 8 solar masses and a cluster mass of 2.5 x 10 exp 9 solar masses.

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