Poster Title: Linking the black hole and bulge formation
Abstract: It has become established in recent years that most, if not all, galaxies harbor a Supermassive Black Hole (SBH) at their center. Moreover, the SBH mass is tighly connected to the large scale properties of the surrounding galaxy, in particular to the velocity dispersion (sigma) of the hot stellar component and, even more intruiging, to the total gravitational mass of the host (through the circular velocity v_c)(Ferrarese (2002), Baes et al. (2003)). Although this last relation is established for only 25 spiral galaxies, a clear trend is starting to emerge: the “v_c-sigma” relation seems to break down for low circular velocities reflecting a fundamental change in the modalities by which bulges form as the mass of the DM halo decreases below a critical value or indicating that the less massive halos are unable to form SBHs, as has been argued on theoretical grounds. To shed light on this problem we started a project to increase the amount of data, over a wide range of Hubble types and circular velocity amplitudes, and to model the dynamical motions of the stars in the vicinity of a SBH.
Link to poster: N/A