Research Division Seminar
Faint double-peak Ha emission discovered in the halo of low redshift galaxies: is it produced by rogue intermediate mass black holes?

Abstract

With the aim of detecting cosmological gas accretion onto galaxies of the local Universe, we examined the Ha emission in the halo of the 164 galaxies in the field of view of MUSE-Wide (Urrutia+19) with observable Ha (redshift < 0.42).  An exhaustive screening of the Ha images led us to select 118 reliable Ha emitting gas clouds. To our surprise, around 38 % of the time the Ha line profile shows a double peak centered at the rest-frame of the corresponding galaxy. We have explored several physical scenarios to explain this Ha emission, among which accretion disks around rogue  intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) fit the observations best. I will describe the data analysis (to discard, e.g, instrumental artifacts and high redshift interlopers), the properties of the Ha emitting clumps (their fluxes, peak separation, and spatial distribution with respect to the central galaxy), and the arguments leading to the IMBH hypothesis rather than other alternatives (e.g., cosmological gas, expanding bubbles, or shocks in the circum galactic medium).