Waking up the beast 

Ultra-energetic phenomena in galaxy mergers

Víctor Moreno

Núria Torres

2nd February 2016

Hubble space telescope archive image (NASA)

Galaxy mergers

The beast: a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.

Waking it up: feeding it with large quantities of gas, which triggers a relativistic jet and a starburst.

How: black holes don't swallow things like in the movies, we need a galaxy merger to direct material towards it.

(in other words, galaxy collisions)

Electromagnetic spectrum 

(in other words, light)

Non-thermal

emission

Non-thermal

emission

Optical image taken by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) ESO 2.2m

Starbursts and jets

The jet seen in X-rays, by Chandra satellite
The jet seen in Radio by the Very Large Array (VLA)
Mid-infrared image taken by Spitzer satellite

Optical

Infrared

X-rays

Radio

THERMAL EMISSION

non-THERMAL EMISSION

HESS Collaboration (Aharonian, F. et al.) Astrophys.J. 695 (2009) 

Starbursts and jets

gamma Rays

Single star interactions

Inner part of Centaurus A
Müller, C. et al. 2014

The non-thermal radiation comes from the shock between the jet and the stellar wind. 

Single star interactions

Our region of interest

Bosch-Ramon, Perucho, Barkov A&A 539, 2012

Direction of the jet

Our Simulations

Direction of the jet

Thank you for your attention!

Made with Slides.com