Bursty Nuclear Star Formation and AGN Fueling

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This movie illustrates the various spatial and time-scales at play in nuclear star formation and black hole growth. Colors show gas density. Face on (top) and edge-on (bottom) in a disk, at different spatial scales (labeled) around the nucleus. The timescale is uniform — we see that the central gas dynamics are fundamentally bursty and chaotic on short timescales, because the dynamical time is short compared to the stellar evolution time, even when the large scale dynamics are ordered (see https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07186). Movie made by Paul Torrey.

© Philip Hopkins 2015