Violent Relaxation Around a Massive Black Hole

Abstract

I present galaxy models resulting from violent relaxation in the presence of a preexisting black hole. The models are computed by maximizing the entropy of the stellar dynamical system. I show that their properties are very similar to those of adiabatic growth models for a suitable choice of parameters. This suggests that observations of nuclear light profiles and kinematics alone may not be sufficient to discriminate between scenarios where a black hole grows adiabatically in the core of a galaxy and scenarios where the black hole formation precedes galaxy formation.