Long-lived lop-sided modes of annular disks orbiting a central mass

Abstract

We demonstrate the existence of long-lived, large-amplitude eccentric modes in massive, annular particle disks in orbit about a central mass. The lopsided modes we have found precess slowly in the prograde direction at a rate which increases with disk mass and decreases with the amplitude of the distortion. The lopsidedness generally survives for as long as we run the calculations and may last indefinitely; we found no significant decay in over 700 disk-particle orbits in one case. These strongly non-linear modes are readily created using a number of different perturbing rules, but we find no evidence for linear instabilities in unperturbed disks. Our results suggest that Tremaine's eccentric disk model for the nucleus of M31 may be viable, but none of our models matches all aspects of the observational data.

4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in ApJ Letters, LaTeX (uses emulateapj.sty)

References in corpus (2)

• Slow modes in Keplerian disks
• Eccentric Nuclear Disks with Self Gravity: Predictions for the Double Nucleus of M31

Cited by in corpus (24)

• HST STIS spectroscopy of the triple nucleus of M31: two nested disks in Keplerian rotation around a Supermassive Black Hole
• The Nuclear Stellar Disk in Andromeda: A Fossil from the Era of Black Hole Growth
• Lopsided Spiral Galaxies
• Dynamics of galaxy cores and supermassive black holes
• Gauss's method for secular dynamics, softened
• Why Are AGN and Host Galaxies Misaligned?
• The Secular Evolution of the Primordial Kuiper Belt
• The Origin of the Young Stars in the Nucleus of M31
• Dynamical Modeling of the Stellar Nucleus of M31
• Global lopsided instability in a purely stellar galactic disc
• Shepherding in a Self-Gravitating Disk of Trans-Neptunian Objects
• The Binary Nucleus in VCC 128: A Candidate Supermassive Black Hole in a Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy
• Self-Gravitating Eccentric Disk Models for the Double Nucleus of M31
• Density waves in debris discs and galactic nuclei
• Global m=1 instabilities and lopsidedness in disc galaxies
• The Effect of General Relativistic Precession on Tidal Disruption Events from Eccentric Nuclear Disks
• Stellar Dynamics around a Massive Black Hole I: Secular Collisionless Theory
• A Slowly Precessing Disk in the Nucleus of M31 as the Feeding Mechanism for a Central Starburst
• The Doubling of Stellar Black Hole Nuclei
• Potential softening and eccentricity dynamics in razor-thin, nearly-Keplerian discs
• Secular Dynamics around a Supermassive Black Hole via Multipole Expansion
• Order-disorder phase transition in black-hole star clusters -- III. A mono-energetic cluster
• Evolution of eccentric stellar disks around supermassive black holes: the complex disk disruption dynamics and the milliparsec stars
• From the Circumnuclear Disk in the Galactic Center to thick, obscuring tori of AGNs -- Modelling the molecular emission of a parsec-scale torus as found in NGC1068