Martin Bureau

Abstract:

Abstract Recent work revealed the existence of a galaxy ‘millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion’, a tight correlation between nuclear 1 mm luminosity, intrinsic 2 – 10 keV X-ray luminosity and supermassive black hole mass, originally discovered for nearby low- and high-luminosity active galactic nuclei. Here we use mm and X-ray data of 5 X-ray binaries (XRBs) to demonstrate that these stellar-mass black holes also lie on the mm fundamental plane, as they do at radio wavelengths. One source for which we have multi-epoch observations shows evidence of deviations from the plane after a state change, suggesting that the plane only applies to XRBs in the hard state, as is true again at radio wavelengths. We show that both advection-dominated accretion flows and compact jet models predict the existence of the plane across the entire range of black hole masses, although these models vary in their ability to accurately predict the XRB black hole masses.

Abstract:

Disentangling the (co-)evolution of individual galaxy structural components remains a difficult task, owing to the inability to cleanly isolate light from spatially overlapping components. In this pilot study of PGC 044931, observed as part of the GECKOS survey, we utilise a VIRCAM H-band image to decompose the galaxy into five photometric components, three of which dominate by contributing > 50% of light in specific regions: a main disc, a boxy/peanut bulge, and a nuclear disc. When the photometric decompositions are mapped onto MUSE observations, we find remarkably good separation in stellar kinematic space. All three structures occupy unique locations in the parameter space of the ratio of the light-weighted stellar line-of-sight mean velocity and velocity dispersion (V⋆/σ⋆), and the high-order stellar skew (h3). These clear and distinct kinematic behaviours allow us to make inferences about the formation histories of the individual components from observations of the mean stellar ages and metallicities of the three components. A clear story emerges: the main disc built over a sustained and extended star formation phase, possibly partly fuelled by gas from a lowmetallicity reservoir. Early on, that disc formed a bar that buckled and subsequently formed a nuclear disc in multiple and enriched star-formation episodes. This result is an example of how careful photometric decompositions, combined with spatially well-resolved stellar kinematic information, can help separate out age-metallicity relations of different components and therefore disentangle the formation history of a galaxy. The results of this pilot study can be extended to a differential study of all GECKOS survey galaxies to assert the true diversity of Milky Way-like galaxies.