geminiann08007 — Anuncio
More Evidence of Gas Inflows Into an Active Galaxy’s Nucleus
20 Febrero 2008: A team of astronomers led by Ph.D. student Rogemar A. Riffel (Universidad do Rio Grande do Sul) have detected streaming gas flows toward the Seyfert nucleus of NGC 4051 located at an estimated distance of about 9.3 Megaparsecs. They used the Near-infrared Field Spectrograph (NIFS), fed by Altair, the Gemini North adaptive optics system, to target the central core of the galaxy. Unlike earlier optical observations of gas inflows into other active galactic nuclei (AGN) (NGC 1097, see GeminiFocus, June 2006, p. 22 and NGC 6951, see ApJ, 2007, 670. 959) these new infrared observations provide even stronger evidence of such inflows since the extinction effects due to dust are less severe in the infrared. To achieve this new result, accurate subtraction of the stellar velocity field from the gaseous velocity field allowed the researchers to isolate non-circular motions observed in the H2-emitting gas (geminiann08007a). Two nuclear spiral arms – …