Papers › Fly-by galaxy encounters with multiple black holes produce star-forming linear wakes
Fly-by galaxy encounters with multiple black holes produce star-forming linear wakes
Nianyi Chen, Patrick LaChance, Yueying Ni, Tiziana Di Matteo, Rupert Croft, Priyamvada Natarajan, Simeon Bird
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We look for simulated star-forming linear wakes such as the one recently discovered by van Dokkum et al. (2023) in the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation ASTRID. Amongst the runaway black holes in ASTRID, none are able to produce clear star-forming wakes. Meanwhile, fly-by encounters, typically involving a compact galaxy (with a central black hole) and a star-forming galaxy (with a duo of black holes) reproduce remarkably well many of the key properties (its length and linearity; recent star formation, etc.) of the observed star-forming linear feature. We predict the feature to persist for approximately 100 Myr in such a system and hence constitute a rare event. The feature contains a partly stripped galaxy (with M_(gal)=10⁹ ∼10¹⁰M_⊙) and a dual BH system (M_(BH)=10⁵ ∼10⁷ M_⊙) in its brightest knot. X-ray emission from AGN in the knot should be detectable in such systems. After 100∼200 Myrs from the first fly-by, the galaxies merge leaving behind a triple black hole system in a (still) actively star-forming early-type remnant of mass ∼5×10¹⁰ M_⊙. Follow-up JWST observations may be key for revealing the nature of these linear features by potentially detecting the older stellar populations constituting the bright knot. Confirmation of such detections may therefore help discriminate a fly-by encounter from a massive BH wake to reveal the origin of such features.
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