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Quasars quash star formation in Active Galactic Nuclei (Forwarded)
ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY PRESS INFORMATION NOTE
Issued by RAS Press Officers: Dr Robert Massey Tel: +44 (0)20 7734 3307 / 4582 Anita Heward Tel: +44 (0)1483 420904 NATIONAL ASTRONOMY MEETING PRESS ROOM (31 MARCH - 4 APRIL ONLY): Tel: +44 (0)2890 975262 / 975263 / 975264 NAM 2008 http://nam2008.qub.ac.uk Royal Astronomical Society http://www.ras.org.uk CONTACTS Paul Westoby Astrophysics Research Institute Liverpool John Moores University Twelve Quays House Egerton Wharf Birkenhead CH41 1LD Tel: +44 151 2312950 EMBARGOED UNTIL 0001 BST, 4 April 2008 Ref.: PN 08/29 (NAM 20) Quasars quash star formation in Active Galactic Nuclei An ambitious study of active and inactive galaxies has given new insights into the complex interaction between super-massive black holes at the heart of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and star formation in the surrounding galaxy. Results will be presented in a talk by Paul Westoby on Friday 4th April at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast. Along with colleagues, Carole Mundell and Ivan Baldry from the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University, Westoby studied the properties of light from 360,000 galaxies in the local Universe to understand the relationship between accreting black holes, the birth of stars in galaxy centres and the evolution of the galaxies as a whole. The study finds that gas ejected during the quasar stage of AGN snuffs out star formation, leaving the host galaxies to evolve passively. The study also reveals a strong link between galaxy mergers and the formation of super-massive black holes in AGN, but shows that if the environment becomes too crowded with galaxies, then the likelihood of firing up a supermassive black hole becomes suppressed. Scientists believe that all AGN go through a quasar phase, where the radiation emitted from the growing accretion disc around the central black hole becomes so bright that it outshines its entire host galaxy. Today, most massive galaxies are thought to contain a dormant super-massive black hole at their heart, a legacy of this earlier phase of powerful quasar activity, but for reasons unknown, some of these local black holes have been reignited. The Liverpool team concentrated on these local AGN, which can be studied in more detail than their more distant quasar cousins, and, by comparing the properties of a large number of galaxies, the team addressed a key question: do galaxies that host AGN represent an adolescent or transition phase of galaxy evolution? "The starlight from the host galaxy can tell us much about how the galaxy has evolved," said Westoby. "Galaxies can be grouped into two simple colour families: the blue sequence, which are young, hotbeds of star-formation and the red sequence, which are massive, cool and passively evolving." Westoby continued, "Scientists have thought for some time that AGN host galaxies might be a stepping stone between the two families and therefore represent a critical point in the lifetime of a galaxy, but our study has been able to rule this out." Instead the AGNs identified by the team lay in galaxies that showed a clear overlap with red sequence galaxies. This suggests that the star-forming days for AGN host galaxies have a distinct cut-off point and that the post-quasar local AGNs are no longer generating new stars. This conclusion is reinforced by the team's findings that the majority of local AGNs are linked with "classical bulges", round balls of stars formed during violent mergers of gas-rich galaxies early on in the Universe's history, rather than "pseudo bulges", disc-only galaxies that have not undergone a major merger since their formation. This implies that the formation of the super-massive black hole that drives the AGN is linked to the evolution of the bulge, rather than the galaxy as a whole. Finally, the team identified an intriguing population of galaxies that have an active population of young stars together with an actively accreting black hole, so-called composite galaxies. These masquerade as a transition population, and lie in the region predicted for galaxies experiencing AGN feedback -- the process by which material ejected by the AGN has a direct impact on the evolution of the surrounding galaxy. However, Westoby and colleagues find feedback an unlikely explanation for the observed properties of these galaxies and suggest that feedback may only be important during the quasar phase and not in weaker, nearby AGN. IMAGES Images can be found at: http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/c....001&dec=1.891 http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/c...546&dec=-0.222 Figure Caption: "Multicolour SDSS optical images of NGC5806 and NGC5750, nearby spiral galaxies with active nuclei similar to those being studied by Westoby and his collaborators. Image credit: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey." NOTES FOR EDITORS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (AGN) Active Galactic Nuclei are now recognised to be integral to galaxy formation and evolution. Examples of AGN include quasars in the early Universe and nearby Seyfert galaxies, both thought to be powered by the release of gravitational potential energy from material being accreted by a central super-massive black hole. The era of greatest quasar activity seems to coincide with turbulent dynamics at the epoch of galaxy formation in the young, gas-rich Universe. The black holes believed to be at the heart of most galaxies are then a legacy of this violent era. The sample was selected from the galaxy catalogue of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Fourth Data Release SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (SDSS) The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, when completed, will provide detailed optical images covering more than a quarter of the sky, and a 3-dimensional map of about a million galaxies and quasars. The galaxy catalogue of the fourth data release was issued in June 2005 and contains data on 520 738 galaxies over 6670 square degrees. Related publication: "Are Galaxies with AGN a Transition Population", Westoby, Mundell & Baldry, 2007, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 382, 1541 |
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