English

Violent Relaxation Around a Massive Black Hole

Astrophysics 2009-10-30 v1

Abstract

I present galaxy models resulting from violent relaxation in the presence of a pre-existing black hole. The models are computed by maximizing the entropy of the stellar dynamical system. I show that their properties are very similar to those of adiabatic growth models for a suitable choice of parameters. This suggests that observations of nuclear light profiles and kinematics alone may not be sufficient to discriminate between scenarios where a black hole grows adiabatically in the core of a galaxy, and scenarios where the black hole formation preceeds galaxy formation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9801021,
  title  = {Violent Relaxation Around a Massive Black Hole},
  author = {M. Stiavelli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9801021},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

13 pages, 3 figures, uses aasms4.sty, to appear in ApJL

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