CO-EVOLUTION OF GALACTIC NUCLEI AND GLOBULAR CLUSTER SYSTEMS

By O. Gnedin, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, S. Tremaine. 2013

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We revisit the hypothesis that dense galactic nuclei are formed from inspiraling globular clusters. Recent advances in the understanding of the continuous formation of globular clusters over cosmic time and the concurrent evolution of the galaxy stellar distribution allow us to construct a simple model that matches the observed spatial and mass distributions of clusters in the Galaxy and the giant elliptical galaxy M87. In order to compare with observations, we model the effects of dynamical friction and dynamical evolution, including stellar mass loss, tidal stripping of stars, and tidal disruption of clusters by the growing galactic nucleus. We find that inspiraling globular clusters form a dense central structure, with mass and radius comparable to the typical values in observed nuclear star clusters (NSCs) in late-type and low-mass early-type galaxies. The density contrast associated with the NSC is less pronounced in giant elliptical galaxies. Our results indicate that the NSC mass as a fraction of mass of the galaxy stellar spheroid scales as . Thus disrupted globular clusters could contribute most of the mass of NSCs in galaxies with stellar mass below 1011 M☉. The inner part of the accumulated cluster may seed the growth of a central black hole via stellar dynamical core collapse, thereby relieving the problem of how to form luminous quasars at high redshift. The seed black hole may reach ∼105 M☉ within ≲ 1 Gyr of the beginning of globular cluster formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bda528c1cc7adf773d03ab3235f1e875c36819e

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Citations in the corpus

Masses and scaling relations for nuclear star clusters, and their co-existence with central black holes (2016, unknown): “…been demonstrated by a number of numerical simulations of merging clusters (Fellhauer & Kroupa 2002; Baumgardt et al. 2003; Bekki et al. 2004; Brüns et al. 2011; Antonini 2013; Gnedin et al. 2014; Arca-Sedda & Capuzzo-Dolcetta 2014) or/and mass build up from gas accretion (Hartmann et al. 2011).”
Chemical tagging with APOGEE: Discovery of a large population of N-rich stars in the inner Galaxy (2016, background): “In line with early theoretical predictions (Tremaine et al. 1975, see also Gnedin et al. 2014), we hypothesise that these stars result from the destruction of pre-existing Galactic globular clusters.”
Nuclear star clusters (2009, methodology): “The simulations of Gnedin et al. (2014) find that the fraction of galaxy mass contained within the NSC scales as MNSC/M?”
Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, methodology): “The BH-BH binary population in real systems may be replenished from the outside, for example from globular clusters that spiral in, or from nearby star formation (e.g., Hopman & Alexander 2006a,b; Gnedin et al. 2014; Antonini et al. 2015a; Aharon & Perets 2016).”