ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

Simulating the timescale dependent color variation in quasars with a revised inhomogeneous disk model

91   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Zhen-Yi Cai
 تاريخ النشر 2016
  مجال البحث فيزياء
والبحث باللغة English
 تأليف Zhen-Yi Cai




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

The UV/optical variability of active galactic nuclei and quasars is useful for understanding the physics of the accretion disk and is gradually attributed to the stochastic fluctuations over the accretion disk. Quasars generally appear bluer when they brighten in the UV/optical, the nature of which remains controversial. Recently citeauthor{Sun2014} discovered that the color variation of quasars is timescale dependent, in the way that faster variations are even bluer than longer term ones. While this discovery can directly rule out models that simply attribute the color variation to contamination from the host galaxies, or to changes in the global accretion rates, it favors the stochastic disk fluctuation model as fluctuations in the innermost hotter disk could dominate the short-term variations. In this work, we show that a revised inhomogeneous disk model, where the characteristic timescales of thermal fluctuations in the disk are radius-dependent (i.e., $tau sim r$; based on the one originally proposed by citeauthor{DexterAgol2011}), can well reproduce a timescale dependent color variation pattern, similar to the observed one and unaffected by the un-even sampling and photometric error. This demonstrates that one may statistically use variation emission at different timescales to spatially resolve the accretion disk in quasars, thus opens a new window to probe and test the accretion disk physics in the era of time domain astronomy. Caveats of the current model, which ought to be addressed in future simulations, are discussed.

قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

We present results of cosmological simulations of disk galaxies carried out with the GADGET-3 TreePM+SPH code, where star formation and stellar feedback are described using our MUlti Phase Particle Integrator (MUPPI) model. This description is based on simple multi-phase model of the interstellar medium at unresolved scales, where mass and energy flows among the components are explicitly followed by solving a system of ordinary differential equations. Thermal energy from SNe is injected into the local hot phase, so as to avoid that it is promptly radiated away. A kinetic feedback prescription generates the massive outflows needed to avoid the over-production of stars. We use two sets of zoomed-in initial conditions of isolated cosmological halos with masses (2-3) * 10^{12} Msun, both available at several resolution levels. In all cases we obtain spiral galaxies with small bulge-over-total stellar mass ratios (B/T approx 0.2), extended stellar and gas disks, flat rotation curves and realistic values of stellar masses. Gas profiles are relatively flat, molecular gas is found to dominate at the centre of galaxies, with star formation rates following the observed Schmidt-Kennicutt relation. Stars kinematically belonging to the bulge form early, while disk stars show a clear inside-out formation pattern and mostly form after redshift z=2. However, the baryon conversion efficiencies in our simulations differ from the relation given by Moster et al. (2010) at a 3 sigma level, thus indicating that our stellar disks are still too massive for the Dark Matter halo in which they reside. Results are found to be remarkably stable against resolution. This further demonstrates the feasibility of carrying out simulations producing a realistic population of galaxies within representative cosmological volumes, at a relatively modest resolution.
We present and analyse new R-band frames of the gravitationally lensed double quasar FBQ 0951+2635. These images were obtained with the 1.5m AZT-22 Telescope at Maidanak (Uzbekistan) in the 2001-2006 period. Previous results in the R band (1999-2001 period) and the new data allow us to discuss the dominant kind of microlensing variability in FBQ 0951+2635. The time evolution of the flux ratio A/B does not favour the continuous production of short-timescale (months) flares in the faintest quasar component B (crossing the central region of the lensing galaxy). Instead of a rapid variability scenario, the observations are consistent with the existence of a long-timescale fluctuation. The flux ratio shows a bump in the 2003-2004 period and a quasi-flat trend in more recent epochs. Apart from the global behaviour of A/B, we study the intra-year variability over the first semester of 2004, which is reasonably well sampled. Short-timescale microlensing is not detected in that period. Additional data in the i band (from new i-band images taken in 2007 with the 2m Liverpool Robotic Telescope at La Palma, Canary Islands) also indicate the absence of short-timescale events in 2007.
The vast majority of dwarf satellites orbiting the Milky Way and M31 are quenched, while comparable galaxies in the field are gas-rich and star-forming. Assuming that this dichotomy is driven by environmental quenching, we use the ELVIS suite of N-bo dy simulations to constrain the characteristic timescale upon which satellites must quench following infall into the virial volumes of their hosts. The high satellite quenched fraction observed in the Local Group demands an extremely short quenching timescale (~ 2 Gyr) for dwarf satellites in the mass range Mstar ~ 10^6-10^8 Msun. This quenching timescale is significantly shorter than that required to explain the quenched fraction of more massive satellites (~ 8 Gyr), both in the Local Group and in more massive host halos, suggesting a dramatic change in the dominant satellite quenching mechanism at Mstar < 10^8 Msun. Combining our work with the results of complementary analyses in the literature, we conclude that the suppression of star formation in massive satellites (Mstar ~ 10^8 - 10^11 Msun) is broadly consistent with being driven by starvation, such that the satellite quenching timescale corresponds to the cold gas depletion time. Below a critical stellar mass scale of ~ 10^8 Msun, however, the required quenching times are much shorter than the expected cold gas depletion times. Instead, quenching must act on a timescale comparable to the dynamical time of the host halo. We posit that ram-pressure stripping can naturally explain this behavior, with the critical mass (of Mstar ~ 10^8 Msun) corresponding to halos with gravitational restoring forces that are too weak to overcome the drag force encountered when moving through an extended, hot circumgalactic medium.
In a recent study, we developed a method to model the impact of photometric redshift uncertainty on the two-point correlation function (2PCF). In this method, we can obtain both the intrinsic clustering strength and the photometric redshift errors si multaneously by fitting the projected 2PCF with two integration depths along the line-of-sight. Here we apply this method to the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys Data Release 8 (LS DR8), the largest galaxy sample currently available. We separate galaxies into 20 samples in 8 redshift bins from $z=0.1$ to $z=1.0$, and a few $rm z$-band absolute magnitude bins, with $M_{rm z} le -20$. These galaxies are further separated into red and blue sub-samples according to their $M^{0.5}_{rm r}-M^{0.5}_{rm z}$ colors. We measure the projected 2PCFs for all these galaxy (sub-)samples, and fit them using our photometric redshift 2PCF model. We find that the photometric redshift errors are smaller in red sub-samples than the overall population. On the other hand, there might be some systematic photometric redshift errors in the blue sub-samples, so that some of the sub-samples show significantly enhanced 2PCF at large scales. Therefore, focusing only on the red and all (sub-)samples, we find that the biases of galaxies in these (sub-)samples show clear color, redshift and luminosity dependencies, in that red brighter galaxies at higher redshift are more biased than their bluer and low redshift counterparts. Apart from the best fit set of parameters, $sigma_{z}$ and $b$, from this state-of-the-art photometric redshift survey, we obtain high precision intrinsic clustering measurements for these 40 red and all galaxy (sub-)samples. These measurements on large and small scales hold important information regarding the cosmology and galaxy formation, which will be used in our subsequent probes in this series.
We model the projected angular two-point correlation function (2PCF) of obscured and unobscured quasars selected using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), at a median redshift of $z sim 1$ using a five-parameter Halo Occupation Distributi on (HOD) parameterization, derived from a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation by Chatterjee et al. The HOD parameterization was previously used to model the 2PCF of optically selected quasars and X-ray bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) at $z sim 1$. The current work shows that a single HOD parameterization can be used to model the population of different kinds of AGN in dark matter halos suggesting the universality of the relationship between AGN and their host dark matter halos. Our results show that the median halo mass of central quasar hosts increases from optically selected ($4.1^{+0.3}_{-0.4} times 10^{12} ; h^{-1} ; {M_{sun}}$) and infra-red (IR) bright unobscured populations ($6.3^{+6.2}_{-2.3} times 10^{12} ; h^{-1} ; {M_{sun}}$) to obscured quasars ($10.0^{+2.6}_{-3.7} times 10^{12} ; h^{-1} ; {M_{sun}}$), signifying an increase in the degree of clustering. The projected satellite fractions also increase from optically bright to obscured quasars and tend to disfavor a simple `orientation only theory of active galactic nuclei unification. Our results also show that future measurements of the small-scale clustering of obscured quasars can constrain current theories of galaxy evolution where quasars evolve from an IR- bright obscured phase to the optically bright unobscured phase.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا