An increase in black hole activity in galaxies with kinematically misaligned gas

Raimundo, Sandra I., Malkan, Matthew and Vestergaard, Marianne (2023) An increase in black hole activity in galaxies with kinematically misaligned gas. Nature Astronomy, 7 (4), 463–472. (doi:10.1038/s41550-022-01880-z).

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Abstract

External accretion events such as a galaxy merger or the accretion of gas from the immediate environment of a galaxy can create a large misalignment between the gas and the stellar kinematics. Numerical simulations have suggested that misaligned structures may promote the inflow of gas to the nucleus of the galaxy and the accretion of gas by the central supermassive black hole. We show for the first time that galaxies with a strong misalignment between the ionized gas and stellar kinematic angles have a higher observed fraction of active black holes than galaxies with aligned rotation of gas and stars. The increase in black hole activity suggests that the process of formation and/or the presence of misaligned structures are connected with the fuelling of active supermassive black holes.

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An increase in black hole activity in galaxies with kinematically misaligned gas - Accepted Manuscript

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Accepted/In Press date: 12 December 2022

e-pub ahead of print date: 19 January 2023

Published date: 1 April 2023

Additional Information: Funding Information: The authors would like to thank the referees for their constructive comments. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 891744 (S.I.R.). This research has been financially supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark via grant number DFF 8021-00130 (M.V.). This paper includes data that have been provided by AAO Data Central (datacentral.org.au). The SAMI Galaxy Survey is based on observations made at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. SAMI was developed jointly by the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. The SAMI input catalogue is based on data taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GAMA Survey and the VST ATLAS Survey. The SAMI Galaxy Survey is funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project number CE110001020, and other participating institutions. This research has made use of the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS (https://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier). The original description of the VizieR service was published in ref.74. This research made use of Astropy (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy75. Funding Information: The authors would like to thank the referees for their constructive comments. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 891744 (S.I.R.). This research has been financially supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark via grant number DFF 8021-00130 (M.V.). This paper includes data that have been provided by AAO Data Central ( datacentral.org.au ). The SAMI Galaxy Survey is based on observations made at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. SAMI was developed jointly by the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. The SAMI input catalogue is based on data taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GAMA Survey and the VST ATLAS Survey. The SAMI Galaxy Survey is funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project number CE110001020, and other participating institutions. This research has made use of the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS ( https://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier ). The original description of the VizieR service was published in ref. . This research made use of Astropy ( http://www.astropy.org ), a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy. Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.