Supermassive black hole mass in the massive elliptical galaxy M87 from integral-field stellar dynamics using OASIS and MUSE with adaptive optics: assessing systematic uncertainties

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 527:2 (2023) 2341-2361

Authors:

David A Simon, Michele Cappellari, Johanna Hartke

Identification of High-Redshift Galaxy Overdensities in GOODS-N and GOODS-S

(2023)

Authors:

Jakob M Helton, Fengwu Sun, Charity Woodrum, Kevin N Hainline, Christopher NA Willmer, Marcia J Rieke, George H Rieke, Stacey Alberts, Daniel J Eisenstein, Sandro Tacchella, Brant Robertson, Benjamin D Johnson, William M Baker, Rachana Bhatawdekar, Andrew J Bunker, Zuyi Chen, Eiichi Egami, Zhiyuan Ji, Roberto Maiolino, Chris Willott, Joris Witstok

JADES: Detecting [OIII]λ4363 emitters and testing strong line calibrations in the high-z Universe with ultra-deep JWST/NIRSpec spectroscopy up to z ∼ 9.5

Astronomy & Astrophysics EDP Sciences 681 (2023) A70-A70

Authors:

Isaac H Laseter, Michael V Maseda, Mirko Curti, Roberto Maiolino, Francesco D’Eugenio, Alex J Cameron, Tobias J Looser, Santiago Arribas, William M Baker, Rachana Bhatawdekar, Kristan Boyett, Andrew J Bunker, Stefano Carniani, Stephane Charlot, Jacopo Chevallard, Emma Curtis-lake, Eiichi Egami, Daniel J Eisenstein, Kevin Hainline, Ryan Hausen, Zhiyuan Ji, Nimisha Kumari, Michele Perna, Tim Rawle, Hans-Walter Rix

Abstract:

We present ten novel [OIII]λ4363 auroral line detections up to z~ 9.5 measured from ultra-deep JWST/NIRSpec MSA spectroscopy from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). We leverage the deepest spectroscopic observations taken thus far with NIRSpec to determine electron temperatures and oxygen abundances using the direct Te method. We directly compare these results against a suite of locally calibrated strong-line diagnostics and recent high-z calibrations. We find the calibrations fail to simultaneously match our JADES sample, thus warranting a self-consistent revision of these calibrations for the high-z Universe. We find a weak dependence between R2 and O3O2 with metallicity, thus suggesting these line ratios are inefficient in the high-z Universe as metallicity diagnostics and degeneracy breakers. We find R3 and R23 are still correlated with metallicity, but we find a tentative flattening of these diagnostics, thus suggesting future difficulties when applying these strong line ratios as metallicity indicators in the high-z Universe. We also propose and test an alternative diagnostic based on a different combination of R3 and R2 with a higher dynamic range. We find a reasonably good agreement (median offset of 0.002 dex, median absolute offset of 0.13 dex) with the JWST sample at low metallicity, but future investigations are required on larger samples to probe past the turnover point. At a given metallicity, our sample demonstrates higher ionization and excitation ratios than local galaxies with rest-frame EWs(Hβ) ≈ 200-300 Å. However, we find the median rest-frame EWs(Hβ) of our sample to be~2× less than the galaxies used for the local calibrations. This EW discrepancy combined with the high ionization of our galaxies does not offer a clear description of [OIII]λ4363 production in the high-z Universe, thus warranting a much deeper examination into the factors influencing these processes

Anisotropic mass segregation: two-component mean-field model

Physical Review D American Physical Society 108:10 (2023) 103004

Authors:

Hanxi Wang, Bence Kocsis

Abstract:

Galactic nuclei, the densest stellar environments in the Universe, exhibit a complex geometrical structure. The stars orbiting the central supermassive black hole follow a mass segregated distribution both in the radial distance from the center and in the inclination angle of the orbital planes. The latter distribution may represent the equilibrium state of vector resonant relaxation. In this paper, we build simple models to understand the equilibrium distribution found previously in numerical simulations. Using the method of maximizing the total entropy and the quadrupole mean-field approximation, we determine the equilibrium distribution of axisymmetric two-component gravitating systems with two distinct masses, semimajor axes, and eccentricities. We also examine the limiting case when one of the components dominates over the total energy and angular momentum, approximately acting as a heat bath, which may represent the surrounding astrophysical environment such as the tidal perturbation from the galaxy, a massive perturber, a gas torus, or a nearby stellar system. Remarkably, the bodies above a critical mass in the subdominant component condense into a disk in a ubiquitous way. We identify the system parameters where the transition is smooth and where it is discontinuous. The latter cases exhibit a phase transition between an ordered disklike state and a disordered nearly spherical distribution both in the canonical and in the microcanonical ensembles for these long-range interacting systems.

Nebular dominated galaxies: insights into the stellar initial mass function at high redshift

(2023)

Authors:

Alex J Cameron, Harley Katz, Callum Witten, Aayush Saxena, Nicolas Laporte, Andrew J Bunker