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!