individual
What campus are you from?
Daytona Beach
Authors' Class Standing
Elizabeth Creviston, Junior
Lead Presenter's Name
Elizabeth Creviston
Faculty Mentor Name
Dr. Bililign Dullo
Abstract
Depleted cores in massive early-type galaxies provide key insights into their merger histories and co-evolution with supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Binary SMBHs that spiral inward after gas-poor galaxy mergers are thought to eject stars from the center through dynamical interactions, scouring out cores and creating central stellar light deficits. Using the full radial extent of James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) F150W imaging, we extracted the surface brightness profile of NGC 4374, a giant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Our structural analysis reveals a compact (FWHM ∼ 0.11′′) active galactic nucleus (AGN) with an apparent magnitude m_F150W ∼17.3 mag, previously undetected in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) studies. We modeled the galaxy’s one- and two-dimensional light distributions using a Gaussian AGN, a core-Sèrsic bulge plus an exponential halo model, deriving an updated core size of 2.14′′(∼ 198.9 pc) and a stellar mass deficit of M_def ∼ 1.6 × 10^10 M_⊙ ≈ 17 (SMBH mass) M_BH. This mass deficit corresponds to ∼ 8.3% of the pre-depletion spheroid mass. The large M_def/M_BH ratio suggests that the core may have been enlarged through repetitive core passages of a gravitational-wave-recoiled SMBH. Our findings reveal the power of JWST/NIRCam imaging to resolve small-scale (10-20 pc) nuclear structures and accurately quantify depleted cores in massive galaxies.
Did this research project receive funding support from the Office of Undergraduate Research.
No
Revisiting the Central Structure of NGC 4374 with JWST/NIRCam: A Hidden AGN and a Depleted Core
Depleted cores in massive early-type galaxies provide key insights into their merger histories and co-evolution with supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Binary SMBHs that spiral inward after gas-poor galaxy mergers are thought to eject stars from the center through dynamical interactions, scouring out cores and creating central stellar light deficits. Using the full radial extent of James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) F150W imaging, we extracted the surface brightness profile of NGC 4374, a giant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Our structural analysis reveals a compact (FWHM ∼ 0.11′′) active galactic nucleus (AGN) with an apparent magnitude m_F150W ∼17.3 mag, previously undetected in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) studies. We modeled the galaxy’s one- and two-dimensional light distributions using a Gaussian AGN, a core-Sèrsic bulge plus an exponential halo model, deriving an updated core size of 2.14′′(∼ 198.9 pc) and a stellar mass deficit of M_def ∼ 1.6 × 10^10 M_⊙ ≈ 17 (SMBH mass) M_BH. This mass deficit corresponds to ∼ 8.3% of the pre-depletion spheroid mass. The large M_def/M_BH ratio suggests that the core may have been enlarged through repetitive core passages of a gravitational-wave-recoiled SMBH. Our findings reveal the power of JWST/NIRCam imaging to resolve small-scale (10-20 pc) nuclear structures and accurately quantify depleted cores in massive galaxies.