Galactic merger implications for eccentric nuclear disks: a mechanism for disk alignment
Abstract
The nucleus of our nearest, large galactic neighbor, M31, contains an eccentric nuclear disk--a disk of stars on eccentric, apsidally-aligned orbits around a supermassive black hole (SMBH). Previous studies of eccentric nuclear disks considered only an isolated disk, and did not study their dynamics under galaxy mergers (particularly a perturbing SMBH). Here, we present the first study of how eccentric disks are affected by a galactic merger. We perform N-body simulations to study the disk under a range of different possible SMBH initial conditions. A second SMBH in the disk always disrupts it, but more distant SMBHs can shut off differential precession and stabilize the disk. This results in a more aligned disk, nearly uniform eccentricity profile, and suppression of tidal disruption events compared to the isolated disk. We also discuss implications of our work for the presence of a secondary SMBH in M31.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2010.15957,
title = {Galactic merger implications for eccentric nuclear disks: a mechanism for disk alignment},
author = {Alexander Rodriguez and Aleksey Generozov and Ann-Marie Madigan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.15957},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
14 pages, 20 figures (19 in main text, 1 in Appendix), submitted to MNRAS