Star formation and gas flows in the centre of the NUGA galaxy NGC 1808 observed with SINFONI

Abstract

NGC 1808 is a nearby barred spiral galaxy which hosts young stellar clusters in a patchy circumnuclear ring with a radius of ∼240 pc. In order to study the gaseous and stellar kinematics and the star formation properties of the clusters, we perform seeing-limited H + Kband near-infrared integral-field spectroscopy with SINFONI of the inner ∼600 pc. From the M BH − σ * relation, we find a black hole mass of a few 10 7 M. We estimate the age of the young stellar clusters in the circumnuclear ring to be 10 Myr. No age gradient along the ring is visible. However, the starburst age is comparable to the travel time along the ring, indicating that the clusters almost completed a full orbit along the ring during their lifetime. In the central ∼600 pc, we find a hot molecular gas mass of ∼730 M which, with standard conversion factors, corresponds to a large cold molecular gas reservoir of several 10 8 M , in agreement with CO measurements from the literature. The gaseous and stellar kinematics show several deviations from pure disc motion, including a circumnuclear disc and signs of a nuclear bar potential. In addition, we confirm streaming motions on the ∼200 pc scale that have recently been detected in CO(1-0) emission. Thanks to the enhanced angular resolution of <1 , we find further streaming motion within the inner arcsecond that had not been detected until now. Despite the flow of gas towards the centre, no signs of significant AGN activity are found. This raises the question: will the infalling gas fuel an AGN or star formation?

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“…Due to the proximity of the H 2 λ2.122 µm and the Brγ line in wavelength, the extinction correction here would only be of the order of a few percent which is much smaller than the error introduced by the uncertainties in the extinction estimate. Therefore we decide not to correct this line ratio (see discussion in Busch et al 2017).…”

“…The observations of these galaxies with integral-field spectroscopy in the near-infrared (NIR) are complementary to the millimeter data (e.g., NGC 1433NGC , 1566NGC , and 1808Smajić et al 2014Smajić et al , 2015Busch et al 2017). The NIR data reveal informa-Article number, page 1 of 20 arXiv:1901.06241v1 [astro-ph.GA] 18 Jan 2019 A&A proofs: manuscript no.…”

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IC 630: Piercing the Veil of the Nuclear Gas

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