Extremely Large Telescope

Abstract:

The dark matter (DM) haloes around spiral galaxies appear to conspire with their baryonic content: empirically, significant amounts of DM are inferred only below a universal characteristic acceleration scale. Moreover, the discrepancy between the baryonic and dynamical mass, which is usually interpreted as the presence of DM, follows a very tight mass discrepancy acceleration (MDA) relation. Its universality, and its tightness in spiral galaxies, poses a challenge for the DM interpretation and was used to argue in favour of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). Here, we test whether or not this applies to early-type galaxies. We use the dynamical models of fast-rotator early-type galaxies by Cappellari et al. based on ATLAS 3D and SAGES Legacy Unifying Globulars and GalaxieS (SLUGGS) data, which was the first homogenous study of this kind, reaching ∼4Re, where DM begins to dominate the total mass budget. We find the early-type galaxies to follow an MDA relation similar to spiral galaxies, but systematically offset. Also, while the slopes of the mass density profiles inferred from galaxy dynamics show consistency with those expected from their stellar content assuming MOND, some profiles of individual galaxies show discrepancies.

Abstract:

Quiescent galaxies with little or no ongoing star formation dominate the population of galaxies with masses above 2 × 10(10) times that of the Sun; the number of quiescent galaxies has increased by a factor of about 25 over the past ten billion years (refs 1-4). Once star formation has been shut down, perhaps during the quasar phase of rapid accretion onto a supermassive black hole, an unknown mechanism must remove or heat the gas that is subsequently accreted from either stellar mass loss or mergers and that would otherwise cool to form stars. Energy output from a black hole accreting at a low rate has been proposed, but observational evidence for this in the form of expanding hot gas shells is indirect and limited to radio galaxies at the centres of clusters, which are too rare to explain the vast majority of the quiescent population. Here we report bisymmetric emission features co-aligned with strong ionized-gas velocity gradients from which we infer the presence of centrally driven winds in typical quiescent galaxies that host low-luminosity active nuclei. These galaxies are surprisingly common, accounting for as much as ten per cent of the quiescent population with masses around 2 × 10(10) times that of the Sun. In a prototypical example, we calculate that the energy input from the galaxy's low-level active supermassive black hole is capable of driving the observed wind, which contains sufficient mechanical energy to heat ambient, cooler gas (also detected) and thereby suppress star formation.