An accreting supermassive black hole irradiating molecular gas in NGC 2110

Abstract

The impact of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) on star formation has implications for our understanding of the relationships between supermassive black holes and their galaxies, as well as for the growth of galaxies over the history of the Universe. We report on a high-resolution multi-phase study of the nuclear environment in the nearby Seyfert galaxy NGC 2110 using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, and the Very Large Telescope/SINFONI. We identify a region that is markedly weak in low-excitation CO $2\to 1$ emission from cold molecular gas, but appears to be filled with ionised and warm molecular gas, which indicates that the AGN is directly influencing the properties of the molecular material. Using multiple molecular gas tracers, we demonstrate that, despite the lack of CO line emission, the surface densities and kinematics of molecular gas vary smoothly across the region. Our results demonstrate that the influence of an AGN on star-forming gas can be quite localized. In contrast to widely-held theoretical expectations, we find that molecular gas remains resilient to the glare of energetic AGN feedback.

Submitted to ApJ Letters; 8 pages, 5 figures; comments welcome

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• LLAMA: The $M_{BH}$ - ${\sigma }_{\star }$ Relation of the most luminous local AGNs
• KASHz: No evidence for ionised outflows instantaneously suppressing star formation in moderate luminosity AGN at $z$$\sim$$1.4$-$2.6$
• Cold molecular gas and PAH emission in Seyfert galaxies
• A CO molecular gas wind 340 pc away from the Seyfert 2 nucleus in ESO 420-G13 probes an elusive radio jet
• Outflows, Inflows and Young Stars in the inner 200 pc of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 2110
• X-ray Photons in the CO 2-1 'Lacuna' of NGC 2110