Jenny E. Greene, Anil Seth, Mark den Brok, James A. Braatz, Christian Henkel, Ai-Lei Sun, Chien Y. Peng, Cheng-Yu Kuo, C. M. Violette Impellizzeri, K. Y. Lo
We examine the alignment between H_2O megamaser disks on sub-pc scales and circumnuclear disks and bars on <500 pc scales observed with HST/WFC3. The HST imaging reveals young stars, indicating the presence of gas. We see no evidence for alignment between megamaser disks and the circumnuclear bars or disks, except perhaps in bulge-dominated galaxies. We speculate on the implications of the observed misalignments for fueling supermassive black holes in gas-rich spiral galaxies. In contrast, we find a strong preference for the rotation axes of the megamaser disks to align with radio continuum jets observed on >50 pc scales, in those galaxies for which radio continuum detections are available. Sub-arcsecond observations of molecular gas with ALMA will enable a more complete understanding of the interplay between circumnuclear structures.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4254
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