Towards Better Simple Stellar Population Modeling of Active Galaxies Using Diffusion K-Means and the Southern African Large Telescope

Details Towards Better Simple Stellar Population Modeling of Active Galaxies Using Diffusion K-Means and the Southern African Large Telescope Towards Better Simple Stellar Population Modeling of Active Galaxies Using Diffusion K-Means and the Southern African Large Telescope

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21915419m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #154.19

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We now know that most galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centers, and somewhat unexpectedly, there are relationships--such as the M-sigma relation--between the mass of the central black hole and the velocity dispersion of the host galaxy's stellar spheroid (bulge), even though they lie outside the black hole's influence. Galaxy merger models show reasonable evidence for coevolution of the bulge and black hole since the merging process initiates simultaneous growth of the black hole and galaxy by supplying gas to the nucleus for accretion onto the black hole and triggering bursts of star formation. The merging process truncates the growth of both by removing the gas reservoir via feedback from these processes. However, it's very difficult to observationally test such models on objects at the peak of black hole growth--during the quasar phase, when the central nucleus outshines the host galaxy. But, by using 3-d spectroscopy methods, namely integral field units (IFUs), we have shown that it is possible to successfully recover information about the host galaxy's integrated star formation history that can be used to check merger-induced galaxy evolution predicted by the models. This research focuses on more reliably decomposing AGN host galaxy spectra into simple stellar populations (SSPs) using a statistical method called diffusion k-means. And in effort to advance this topic further with new instrumentation, this research also involves testing and development of the detector for the near infrared arm of the Robert Stobie Spectrograph (RSS) for the newly commissioned 11-meter Southern African Large Telescope (SALT).

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