Cecil, G. N., Wagner, A. Y., Bland-Hawthorn, J., Bicknell, G. V., Mukherjee, D. 2021. ApJ (accepted).
"Tracing the Milky Way’s Vestigial Nuclear Jet." Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00901.
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Jet propagation through the Milky Way
Energy bubbles extending above the Milky Way galactic plane were detected in X-rays with ROSAT1 and described in 2003 by Bland-Hawthorn & Cohen2 as phenomena powered by bipolar galactic winds. The energy bubbles were seen in gamma-rays by the Fermi-LAT satellite in 20103 and have since been called "Fermi Bubbles".
Spectacular flow channels on scales of a few 100 parsec revealed by recent MeerKAT radio images4 and XMM-Newton and eROSITA X-ray images5,6 support the notion that, a few million years ago, an AGN jet - a relativistic jet launched by the central supermassive black hole - passed through the Milky Way galaxy and inflated the Fermi Bubbles.
In this project7 we looked for indications of past jet activity by searching for relics of the jet's passage through the interstellar medium in archival X-ray images, Hubble Space Telescope Paschen-α images and ALMA spectra, and new SOAR telescope infrared spectra. Using hydrodynamic simulations, we test whether the relics were indeed formed through jet-interstellar-medium interactions.
Milky-Way disc scale simulations
With these simulations we investigate the propagation of the jet across several hundred parsec through the gaseous Milky Way disc. The jets were likely responsible for clearing the disc gas in the central regions of the Milky Way before inflating the Fermi Bubbles.
Circum-nuclear disc scale simulations
With these simulations we investigate the effects of the jet on the circum-nuclear gas rotating around the black hole. The simulations explore formation mechanisms of anomalous components in the circum-nuclear gas.
Acknowledgements
Numerical calculations were performed on the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) facility hosted at the Australian National University and supercomputers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19K03862 supported the numerical work.
References
- Snowden, S.L. et al., 1997. ROSAT Survey Diffuse X-Ray Background Maps. II. ApJ, 485, p.125.
- Bland‐Hawthorn, J. & Cohen, M., 2003. The Large‐Scale Bipolar Wind in the Galactic Center. ApJ, 582(1), pp.246–256.
- Su, M., Slatyer, T. R., & Finkbeiner, D. P. 2010, ApJ, 724, 1044.
- Heywood, I., Camilo, F., Cotton, W. D., et al.2019, Nature, 573, 235.
- Ponti, G., Hofmann, F., Churazov, E., et al. 2019, Nature, 567, 347.
- Predehl, P., Sunyaev, R., & Becker, W. e. a. 2020, Nature, 588, 227–231.
- Cecil, G. N., Wagner, A. Y., Bland-Hawthorn, J., Bicknell, G. V., Mukherjee, D. 2021. Tracing the Milky Way’s Vestigial Nuclear Jet. Accepted for publication in ApJ