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The Warped Disk of Centaurus A from a Radius of 2 to 6500 pc

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Alice C. Quillen*
Affiliation:
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA
Nadine Neumayer
Affiliation:
European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str 2, 85748 Garching, Germany
Tom Oosterloo
Affiliation:
Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, Postbus 2, 7990 AA Dwingeloo, the Netherlands; Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Daniel Espada
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC), Apdo. 3004, 18080 Granada, Spain
*
FCorresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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We compile position and inclination angles for tilted ring fits to the warped dusty and gaseous disk of Cen A, spanning a radius of 1.8 to 6500 pc, from recent observations. For radii exterior to 1 kpc, tilted-ring orientations lie on an arc, on a plot of polar-inclination versus position-angle, suggesting that precession following a merger can account for the ring morphology. Three kinks in the ring orientations are seen on the polar plot, the one at radius of about 1.3 kpc we suspect corresponds to the location where self-gravity in the disk affects the ring precession rate. Another at a radius of about 600 pc may be associated with a gap in the gas distribution. A third kink is seen at a radius of 100 pc. A constant inclination tilted disk precessing about the jet axis may describe the disk between 100 and 20 pc but not interior to this. A model with disk orientation matching the molecular circumnuclear disk at 100 pc that decays at smaller radii to an inner flat disk perpendicular to the jet may account for disk orientations within 100 pc. Neither model would account for the cusps or changes in disk orientation at 100 or 600 pc.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of Australia 2010

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