Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter SMBHs

Wednesday, 23 September 2020, 16:25   (virtual room K)

Interaction among intermediate redshift galaxies

Persis Misquitta (1), Micah Bowles (1), Andreas Eckart (1,2), Madeleine Yttergren (1,2), et. al.
1-Universität zu Köln, 2-MPIfR

Interactions are thought to play an important role in the evolution of galaxies. The process causes the gas in the individual galaxies to collide, collapse, and funnel to the centres of the galaxies leading to bursts of star formation and in some cases, enabling the black holes at the centres to start accreting matter, thereby giving birth to the extremely energetic phenomenon known as the Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). We present here the case of one such pair of interacting galaxies: SDSSJ134420.86+663717.8. We obtained long slit spectroscopy data for the nuclei of both of the galaxies and used it to extract one dimensional spectra. Analysis of the spectra reveals that one galaxy harbours an AGN, while the other nucleus has a star-forming nature. We plotted diagnostic diagrams, deduced rotation curves, and calculated black holes masses for both of the nuclei. We find that the masses of the central supermassive black holes are almost equal at a few times 10^7 M⊙. Additionally, we present a simple N-body simulation to shed some light on the initial conditions of the progenitor galaxies. We find that for an almost orthogonal approach of the two interacting galaxies, the model resembles the optical image of the system. Reference: Misquitta et. al. 2020, A&A 639