A two-stage outflow in NGC 1068

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Abstract
We present an analysis of the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 1068 of archive data from the Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared (SINFONI)-Very Large Telescope, in the HK bands with pixel scales of 0.1 (data set 1 – DS1) and 0.025 (DS2) arcsec. The data are revisited with a sophisticated data treatment, such as the differential atmospheric refraction correction and the application of a Butterworth filtering and deconvolution. The gain in the process is quantified by a significant improvement in the Strehl ratio and it shows that an unprecedented high spatial resolution is achieved. For DS1, a detailed study of the H2, [Fe ii] and [Si vi] emission lines reveals a three-phase gas morphology: (1) the low-velocity [Fe ii] emission representing the glowing wall of an hourglass structure, (2) the high-velocity compact blobs of low and high ionization emissions filling the hourglass volume and (3) the distribution of H2 molecular gas defines the thick and irregular walls of a bubble surrounding a cavity. Both the hourglass and the molecular emissions have an asymmetry caused by the fragmentation of the north-eastern molecular wall, closest to the active galactic nucleus, resulting in high-velocity compact blobs of ionized gas outside the bubble. The south-western part of the bubble is excavated by the jet, where the blobs remain confined and are blown along the bubble's inner boundary. We propose that those blobs are driven by a hot ‘secondary wind’ coming from the spot where the jet interacts and injects its energy in the molecular gas. The combination of a primary wind launched by the central source and the secondary wind is what we call a two-stage outflow. For DS2, we detected a [Si vi] outflow nearly coplanar to the maser disc and orthogonal to the CO outflow found by a previous study. Such unexpected scenario is interpreted as the interaction between the central radiation field and a two-phase gas density torus.
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Funding Information
  • NASA (2011/19824-8, 2011/51680-6)

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