Abstract
When a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy accretes matter, it gives rise to a highly energetic phenomenon: an active galactic nucleus1,2. Numerous physical processes have been proposed to account for the funnelling of gas towards the galactic centre to feed the black hole. There are also several physical processes that can remove gas from a galaxy3, one of which is ram-pressure strip** by the hot gas that fills the space between galaxies in galaxy clusters4. Here we report that six out of a sample of seven ‘jellyfish’ galaxies—galaxies with long ‘tentacles’ of material that extend for dozens of kiloparsecs beyond the galactic disks5,6—host an active nucleus, and two of them also have galactic-scale ionization cones. The high incidence of nuclear activity among heavily stripped jellyfish galaxies may be due to ram pressure causing gas to flow towards the centre and triggering the activity, or to an enhancement of the strip** caused by energy injection from the active nucleus, or both. Our analysis of the galactic position and velocity relative to the cluster strongly supports the first hypothesis, and puts forward ram pressure as another possible mechanism for feeding the central supermassive black hole with gas.
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Acknowledgements
This work is based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere under ESO programme 196.B-0578. We thank M. Fossati and D. Wilman for develo** and making available KUBEVIZ. We acknowledge financial support from PRIN-INAF 2014. B.V. acknowledges support from an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (PD0028506). S.T. was supported by an Alvin E. Nashman Fellowship in Theoretical Astrophysics. This work was co-funded under the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (FP7-COFUND).
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All authors contributed to the interpretation of the observations and the writing of the paper. B.M.P. led the project and performed the data analysis. Y.J. performed the phase-space analysis. A.M. carried out the stellar kinematics analysis. M.G. did the data reduction. M.R. contributed to the data analysis. S.T. provided the discussion on simulations. J.F. did the SINOPSIS analysis. D.B. and G.F. helped in the preparation of the observations. B.V. performed a comparison of the stellar population analysis and prepared the GASP web page. C.B. performed the two-component KUBEVIZ analysis of JO201. G.H. did the data reduction for JO201. A.O. selected the JW100 target.
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Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Figure 1 Summary diagnostic diagrams.
Line ratio diagrams summarizing our findings, showing the location of each galaxy in two different diagnostics diagrams integrating the spectrum over the spatial region (identified from Fig. 3) dominated by AGN emission (JO201, JO204, JW100, JO206, JO135), by LINER emission (JO194) and over the central 7 × 7 brightest spaxels in the case of JO175. Here we present both the [N ii]6,583/Hα (left) and the [S ii]6,717/Hα (right) diagrams, to illustrate the good agreement between the two and also to display JW100 whose [N ii] line cannot be measured. Lines as in Fig. 3. The two components in JO201, JO204 and JW100 are shown as separate points. The error bars are computed propagating the errors on the line fluxes obtained by KUBEVIZ, scaled to achieve a reduced χ2 = 1 as described elsewhere15.
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Poggianti, B., Jaffé, Y., Moretti, A. et al. Ram-pressure feeding of supermassive black holes. Nature 548, 304–309 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23462
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23462
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