Galactic nuclei in the local universe: supermassive black holes and stellar archeology of galaxies of high and low masses

Abstract

In this project, we propose to study data cubes from two statistically complete samples of galaxies. The first of them will be composed by objects of morphological types E+S0 and the second by objects of types Scd+Sd. The galaxies of types E+S0, in general, have high mass, little gas, low star formation, are dominated by classical bulges and often show nuclear activity. However, the ones of types Scd+Sd have low mass, great amounts of gas, strong star formation, are associated to pseudo-bulges and rarely show nuclear activity. All of the selected objects for this work are brighter than B = 11 and have |b| > 10°. A detailed procedure of data treatment, developed by us in previous years, will be applied in all of the data cubes we will analyze. This procedure will include: correction of the differential atmospheric refraction, Butterworth filtering of spatial and spectral high frequency noises, removal of instrumental fingerprints and Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. The main methodologies for the analysis of the data cubes in this work will be: PCA Tomography, spectral synthesis with the software Starlight, determination of the kinematical parameters with the pPXF, removal of the synthetic stellar continua (obtained with the spectral synthesis) and analysis of the residual data cube. Depending on the nature of the object, the following techniques may also be used: BPT diagnostic diagrams, elaboration of images of high and low densities (from the [SII] lines), dynamical simulation with the methods of Jeans and Schwarzschild, dynamical simulation with the model of a gaseous disk and analysis of the stellar archeology. The main goals of this work are: determine the fraction of galaxies E+S0 and Scd+Sd with AGN, determine the history of star formation, determine the metallicity of the stellar population, study the kinematics of the stellar and gaseous components, measure the mass of the central black hole, check the existence of double or binary AGN and elaborate a comparative study between bulges and pseudo-bulges. (AU)