Evidence for quasar fast outflows being accelerated at the scale of tens of parsecs

Zhicheng He; Guilin Liu; Tinggui Wang; Guobin Mou; Richard Green; Weihao Bian; Huiyuan Wang; Luis C Ho; Mouyuan Sun; Lu Shen; Nahum Arav; Chen Chen; Qingwen Wu; Hengxiao Guo; Zesen Lin; Junyao Li; Weimin Yi

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abk3291

Evidence for quasar fast outflows being accelerated at the scale of tens of parsecs

Sci Adv. 2022 Feb 11;8(6):eabk3291. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abk3291. Epub 2022 Feb 11.

Authors

Zhicheng He^{1

2}, Guilin Liu^{1

2}, Tinggui Wang^{1

2}, Guobin Mou³, Richard Green⁴, Weihao Bian⁵, Huiyuan Wang^{1

2}, Luis C Ho^{6

7}, Mouyuan Sun⁸, Lu Shen^{1

2}, Nahum Arav⁹, Chen Chen¹⁰, Qingwen Wu¹¹, Hengxiao Guo¹², Zesen Lin^{1

2}, Junyao Li^{1

2}, Weimin Yi¹³

Affiliations

¹ CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
² School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
³ School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China.
⁴ Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0065, USA.
⁵ Department of Physics and Institute of Theoretical Physics, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China.
⁶ Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
⁷ Department of Astronomy, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
⁸ Department of Astronomy, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China.
⁹ Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
¹⁰ School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519082, China.
¹¹ School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
¹² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, 4129 Frederick Reines Hall, Irvine, CA 92697-4575, USA.
¹³ Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, 525 Davey Lab, University Park, PA 16802, USA.

Abstract

Quasar outflows may play a crucial role in regulating the host galaxy, although the spatial scale of quasar outflows remain a major enigma, with their acceleration mechanism poorly understood. The kinematic information of outflow is the key to understanding its origin and acceleration mechanism. Here, we report the galactocentric distances of different outflow components for both a sample and an individual quasar. We find that the outflow distance increases with velocity, with a typical value from several parsecs to more than one hundred parsecs, providing direct evidence for an acceleration happening at a scale of the order of 10 parsecs. These outflows carry ∼1% of the total quasar energy, while their kinematics are consistent with a dust-driven model with a launching radius comparable to the scale of a dusty torus, indicating that the coupling between dust and quasar radiation may produce powerful feedback that is crucial to galaxy evolution.