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3.25. Radiative avalanche driven by a circumnuclear starburst torus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2016

Ken Ohsuga
Affiliation:
Institute of Physics, University of Tsukuba Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305, Japan; ohsuga@het.ph.tsukuba.ac.jp
Masayuki Umemura
Affiliation:
Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305, Japan; umemura@rccp.tsukuba.ac.jp

Extract

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Recently, a novel mechanism for fueling active galactic nuclei (AGNs) has been proposed by Umemura et al. (1997a, b). That is a radiative avalanche, in which a rotating gas disk sheds angular momentum due to the radiation drag force exerted by starlight from circumnuclear starbursts, so that the mass accretion onto nuclei is driven. Originally, a thin ring of a starburst region has been assumed for simplicity. However, recent observations have revealed that circumnuclear starburst rings have radial extension of ∼ 10pc up to kpc, and they often consist of compact star clusters of < 10pc Thus, the ratio of the half thickness to curvature radius of the ring can be minimally less than one tenth when all the star clusters are aligned on a plane of an inner gas disk, while the ratio could be larger if the distributions of star clusters are extended due to some velocity dispersions.

Type
Part I. Stellar Cluster, Star Formation
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1998 

References

Umemura, M., Fukue, J., Mineshige, S. (1997a) Radiative Avalanche: Starburst Induced Fuelling to AGNs, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol.479 no.2, pp. 97100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Umemura, M., Fukue, J., Mineshige, S. (1997b) Radiative Avalanche onto Galactic Nuclei Induced by Circumnuclear Starbursts, submitted to Astrophysical Journal.Google Scholar