Ruben Diaz, Marcelo Mora, Mast Damian, Gabriel Oio, Ricardo Amorín, Jorge F. García Yus, Veronica Firpo, German Gimeno, Gonzalo Diaz, Guillermo Gunthardt, Eduardo Schmidt, Horacio Dottori
Abstract
Active galactic nuclei are complex phenomena that have avoided fully understanding due, in part, to their high distances which prohibits good spatial resolution observations. In the last few years some facilities have permitted to map the innermost regions of these nuclei finding complex structures of gas and dust in many phases. However, their origin, feeding mechanism and evolution processes remain somewhat elusive, especially at the innermost and dust enshrouded regions. We have studied the cases of NGC 6300 and NGC 4945 with longslit K-band spectroscopy and JHK imaging from Flamingos-2 (F-2) and found new results regarding the dust location and nuclear geometry. In the long term we are building a sample of F-2 K-band observations of nearby dust enshrouded active nuclei. We are now proposing to target 2 nearby active galaxies using the long slit K-long R3K spectroscopic mode of F-2. The K-band spectra of these galaxies will allow us to determine the extension of the nuclear hot dust in two perpendicular spatial directions and also look for possible off-centerings between the nucleus and larger scale galactic structure in order to test the oscillation driven feeding mechanism. In addition other NIR studies will be carried out such as radial velocity curves of molecular and ionized gas, radial mass distributions and gas excitation line diagnostics.