Violent Relaxation Around a Massive Black Hole

Abstract

I present galaxy models resulting from violent relaxation in the presence of a pre-existing black hole. The models are computed by maximizing the entropy of the stellar dynamical system. I show that their properties are very similar to those of adiabatic growth models for a suitable choice of parameters. This suggests that observations of nuclear light profiles and kinematics alone may not be sufficient to discriminate between scenarios where a black hole grows adiabatically in the core of a galaxy, and scenarios where the black hole formation preceeds galaxy formation.

13 pages, 3 figures, uses aasms4.sty, to appear in ApJL

References in corpus (4)

• The supermassive black hole of M87 and the kinematics of its associated gaseous disk
• Improved evidence for a black hole in M32 from HST/FOS spectra - II. Axisymmetric dynamical models
• New evidence for a massive black hole at the centre of the quiescent galaxy M32
• Improved evidence for a black hole in M32 from HST/FOS spectra - I. Observations

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• Evidence for a 3 x 10^8 solar mass black hole in NGC 7052 from HST observations of the nuclear gas disk
• Phase transitions in self-gravitating systems. Self-gravitating fermions and hard spheres models
• The black hole mass distribution in early-type galaxies: cusps in HST photometry interpreted through adiabatic black hole growth
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• The Black Hole Mass - Galaxy Age Relation
• Central cusp due to a super-massive black hole in axisymmetric models of elliptical galaxies
• Radial stability of a family of anisotropic Hernquist models with and without a supermassive black hole
• Exploring the cosmic dark ages with the next generation of space and ground-based facilities