Young Stars in the Centers of Galaxies

A long time ago, I trashed a Creationist article on Stellar Evolution. It was a fun time. I got one of the most ignorant trolls I've yet had on this site and even Phil Plait came over to gawk and point at the giant logical gaps. One of the claims that the author had made was that, because we shouldn't see young stars in very close quarters to black holes in the centers of galaxies (the nearest 1 parsec), and we do, that all of stellar evolution must be wrong and thus, God did it.

Mollishka from A Geocentric View (which sadly hasn't been updated in a year) pointed out that the only galaxies for which we could have sufficient resolution to even discuss the stellar populations of the innermost parsec, would be our own and Andromeda. So trying to draw grand conclusions from a tiny number of cases, as the Creationist was trying to do was just idiotic. Compile that with the completely unrelated conclusion that it meant that God did it, and you get normal Creationist mentality.

Meanwhile, the problem of young stars in the inner portions of galaxies was still an unsolved problem. But instead of tossing their hands up and declaring it impossible a la Behe¹. But while Creationists buried their heads in the sand, real scientists continued to try to figure out what was going on.

A new paper looks to have some promising answers. The real trick in the whole problem is getting gas in close enough to the black hole to form young stars without chucking it in to be eaten.

The new paper ran simulations and found that due to gravitational instabilities that effected stars and gas differently, galaxies with supermassive black holes like M31's would form disks of each separately and tilted with respect to one another. The interplay between these disks allows the stellar disk to yank some of the gas out and send it towards the black hole. There, "[s]ome of the gas turns into stars, those stars are excited into the m = 1 mode, allowing the perturbation to efficiently propagate inwards to ~0.1pc."

Booya.

New stars. Real science.

---

¹ - "As scientists, we yearn to understand how this magnificent mechanism came to be, but the complexity of the system dooms all Darwinian explanations to frustration. Sisyphus himself would pity us."
~Michael Behe: Darwin's Black Box

Philip F. Hopkins, & Eliot Quataert (2010). The Nuclear Stellar Disk in Andromeda: A Fossil from the Era of Black Hole Growth MNRAS arXiv: 1002.1079v2