Obscuring and Feeding Supermassive Black Holes with Evolving Nuclear Star Clusters

Recently, high-resolution observations made with the help of the near-infrared adaptive optics integral field spectrograph SINFONI at the VLT proved the existence of massive and young nuclear star clusters in the centers of a sample of Seyfert galaxies. With the help of high-resolution hydrodynamica...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union Vol. 5; no. S267; pp. 307 - 312
Main Authors: Schartmann, M., Burkert, A., Krause, M., Camenzind, M., Meisenheimer, K., Davies, R. I.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.08.2009
Subjects:
Astrophysics
Black holes
Contributed Papers
Fluid mechanics
Kinematics
Star & galaxy formation
Stars & galaxies
galaxies: Seyfert
galaxies: individual (NGC 1068)
black hole physics
ISM: evolution
galaxies: ISM
ISM: kinematics and dynamics
hydrodynamics
galaxies: nuclei
methods: numerical
stars: mass loss
ISSN:1743-9213, 1743-9221
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Recently, high-resolution observations made with the help of the near-infrared adaptive optics integral field spectrograph SINFONI at the VLT proved the existence of massive and young nuclear star clusters in the centers of a sample of Seyfert galaxies. With the help of high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations with the pluto code, we follow the evolution of such clusters, especially focusing on mass and energy feedback from young stars. This leads to a filamentary inflow of gas on large scales (tens of parsecs), whereas a turbulent and very dense disk builds up on the parsec scale. Here we concentrate on the long-term evolution of the nuclear disk in NGC 1068 with the help of an effective viscous disk model, using the mass input from the large-scale simulations and accounting for star formation in the disk. This two-stage modeling enables us to connect the tens-of-parsecs scale region (observable with SINFONI) with the parsec-scale environment (MIDI observations). At the current age of the nuclear star cluster, our simulations predict disk sizes of the order 0.8 to 0.9 pc, gas masses of order 106M⊙, and mass transfer rates through the inner boundary of order 0.025 M⊙yr−1, in good agreement with values derived from observations.
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ISSN:1743-9213
1743-9221
DOI:10.1017/S1743921310006526