Friday, March 12, 2010, Noon, Phillips Auditorium
Nuclear Star Clusters - Clues to Black Hole Formation
Dr. Nadine Neumayer, European Southern Observatory
| Nuclear star clusters (NCs) appear to follow the same scaling relation as supermassive black holes in that their mass is proportional to the mass of their host galaxy. It has therefore been proposed that NCs are an alternative incarnation of "central massive objects" in lower mass galaxies. However, unlike black holes, NCs provide a visible record of the accretion of stars and gas into the nucleus. I will present our ongoing programme to obtain high spatial resolution kinematic observations of the nearest nuclear star clusters using adaptive optics-assisted integral-field spectroscopy. These observations provide important information on the formation mechanism of nuclear star clusters, and allow us to estimate nuclear star cluster and potential black hole masses and examine scaling relations with their host galaxies. |
