Detection of a Compact Nuclear Radio Source in the Local Group Elliptical Galaxy M32
Abstract
The Local Group compact elliptical galaxy M32 hosts one of the nearest candidate super-massive black holes (SMBHs), which has a previously suggested X-ray counterpart. Based on sensitive observations taken with the {\it Karl G. Jansky} Very Large Array (VLA), we detect for the first time a compact radio source coincident with the nucleus of M32, which exhibits an integrated flux density of Jy at 6.6 GHz. We discuss several possibilities for the nature of this source, favoring an origin of the long-sought radio emission from the central SMBH, for which we also revisit the X-ray properties based on recently acquired {\sl Chandra} and {\sl XMM-Newton} data. Our VLA observations also discover radio emission from three previously known optical planetary nebulae in the inner region of M32.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.03231,
title = {Detection of a Compact Nuclear Radio Source in the Local Group Elliptical Galaxy M32},
author = {Yang Yang and Zhiyuan Li and Loránt O. Sjouwerman and Q. Daniel Wang and Qiusheng Gu and Ralph P. Kraft and Feng Yuan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.03231},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
13 pages, 2 figures, accepted by ApJ Letters