Can a Satellite Galaxy Merger Explain the Active Past of the Galactic Center?
Astrophysics of Galaxies
2016-03-02 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Abstract
Observations of the Galactic Center (GC) have accumulated a multitude of "forensic" evidence indicating that several million years ago the center of the Milky Way galaxy was teaming with starforming and accretion-powered activity -- this paints a rather different picture from the GC as we understand it today. We examine a possibility that this epoch of activity could have been triggered by the infall of a satellite galaxy into the Milky Way which began at the redshift of 10 and ended few million years ago with a merger of the Galactic supermassive black hole with an intermediate mass black hole brought in by the inspiralling satellite.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1107.2923,
title = {Can a Satellite Galaxy Merger Explain the Active Past of the Galactic Center?},
author = {Meagan Lang and Kelly Holley-Bockelmann and Tamara Bogdanovic and Pau Amaro-Seoane and Alberto Sesana and Manodeep Sinha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.2923},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
9 pages, 1 figure, accepted by MNRAS. Comments are welcome