SUPER-MASSIVE BLACK HOLE SCALING RELATIONS AND PECULIAR RINGED GALAXIES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY BURCIN MUTLU IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY MARC S. SEIGAR June, 2017 c BURCIN MUTLU 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Acknowledgements There are several people who I would like to acknowledge for directly or indirectly contributing to this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the guidance and support of my ad- visor, Marc S. Seigar. I am thankful to him for his continuous encouragement, patience, and kindness. I appreciate all his contributions of knowledge, expertise, and time, which were invaluable to my success in graduate school. He has set an example of excellence as a researcher, mentor, and role model. In addition, I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Liliya L. R. Williams, M. Claudia Scarlata, and Robert Lysak, for their insightful input, constructive criticism and direction during the course of this dissertation. I have crossed paths with many collaborators who have influenced and enhanced my research. Patrick Treuthardt has been a collaborator for most of the work during my dissertation. The addition of his scientific point of view has improved the quality of the work in this dissertation tremendously. Our discussions have always been stimulating and rewarding. I am thankful to him for mentoring me and being a dear friend to me. I would also like to thank Benjamin L. Davis for numerous helpful advice and inspiring discussions. He has directly involved with many aspects of Chapter 1. I am also grateful to Joel C. Berrier for his valuable feedbacks on Chapter 2. I would like to particularly acknowledge Alister W. Graham for the ideas that he shared with me and i for the research directions that he advised me. I am thankful to him for introducing me to the collaboration on the search of intermediate-mass black holes. Within this project, I thank Filippos Koliopanos, Bogdan C. Ciambur, Natalie A. Webb, Mickael Coriat, Olivier Godet, and Didier Barret, and I am looking forward to continue this fruitful collaboration. In addition, I would like to acknowledge Ian B. Hewitt, who contributed to updating the software for the measurements of spiral arm pitch angle, and Lauren E. Koval, who contributed to writing the initial scripts to engage with Illustris data in Chapter 2. I would also like to thank Mithila Mangedarage for the innumerable scientific conversations. In addition, I acknowledge Noah Brosch for his valuable comments and suggestions which have considerably contributed to Chapter 5. In this context, I would like to especially mention the contributions of the referees of the various journals. This research has made extensive use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Tech- nology, under contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Part of this work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and obtained from the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is a collabo- ration between the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI/NASA), the Space Tele- scope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF/ESA) and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC/NRC/CSA). The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) public access site is also used for retrieving Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) Re- lease 7 data products. GALEX is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. I also made use of the data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by NASA and National Science Foundation (NSF) and data products from the Wide-field Infrared ii Survey Explorer (WISE), which is a joint project of the University of California, Los An- geles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by NASA. Chapter 3 has made use of the Illustris database. The Illustris project acknowl- edges support from many sources: support by the DFG Research Centre SFB-881 The Milky Way System through project A1, and by the European Research Council under ERC-StG EXAGAL-308037, support from the HST grants program, number HST-AR- 12856.01-A, support for program #12856 by NASA through a grant from STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555, support from NASA grant NNX12AC67G and NSF grant AST-1312095, support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, NSF grant AST- 0907969, support from XSEDE grant AST-130032, which is supported by NSF grant number OCI-1053575. The Illustris simulation was run on the CURIE supercomputer at CEA/France as part of PRACE project RA0844, and the SuperMUC computer at the Leibniz Computing Centre, Germany, as part of project pr85je. Further simulations were run on the Harvard Odyssey and CfA/ITC clusters, the Ranger and Stampede supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center through XSEDE, and the Kraken supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory through XSEDE. I had the privilege of presenting the portions of this dissertation at several confer- ences and seminar talks. On many of these conferences, I met several distinguished researchers with whom I had stimulating discussions. I acknowledge the support of the American Astronomical Society and NSF in the form of an International Travel Grant, which enabled me to attend these conferences, and the generous support of the University of Minnesota Duluth and the Fund for Astrophysical Research. I would also like to acknowledge Adrian Smith who made a short film to present my research on peculiar ringed galaxies to a non-scientific audience and helped me to reach out to the general public. I am grateful to Mahdi Sanati and Beth Thacker for iii all the support and encouragement they provided throughout my graduate life. I very much appreciate all the assistance Terry J. Jones, Terry Thibeault and Jeanne Peterson provided during my academic stay in Minnesota. I would like to thank the members of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at University of Minnesota, both Twin Cities and Duluth campuses. The faculty, staff, and students really made my life in Minnesota one I will always remember. While graduate school was sometimes stressful, I had close friends whom I could always count on to get me through the tough times. I especially thank Sabriye C¸akmak, Neslihan Bi¸sgin, Cholpon Tilegenova, Hilal Cansızo˘glu and Elife Do˘gan for providing me a lot of support and encouragement over the years. I extend my sincerest thanks to Colleen Seigar, who invited me over every Thanksgiving and created an unique family environment for me. I am eternally grateful to all of my family for supporting me in every way through this journey. First and foremost, I would like to thank my husband, Muhammet Pakdil, for always being there for me, believing in me, and keeping me sane. Without his ongoing support, I could not have finished my research. I am extremely grateful to my father, Baattin Mutlu, and my mother, G¨ulten Mutlu, who raised me and taught me to study hard and to give priority in my life to the quest for knowledge. I owe my deepest gratitude to my sister, Burcu Mutlu, who helped spark and nurture my interest in science. She always inspires me to explore new directions in life and follow my dreams. iv Dedication To my mom and dad. This journey would not have been possible if not for them, and I dedicate this dissertation to them. v Abstract This dissertation aims to improve the theory of galaxy formation through two indepen- dent areas of investigation: 1) super-massive black hole (BH) scaling relations and 2) formation mechanisms of peculiar rings. Several scaling relations between BH masses and numerous properties of their host galaxies have been reported in the literature, implying a co-evolution scenario of galaxies and their central BHs. The first part of this dissertation explores these scaling relations in both observations and simulations. Chapter 2 presents two important applications of the scaling relations: a determination of black hole mass function (BHMF) and a search for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). I estimated a local BHMF through imaging data only by using the statistically tightest correlations. This work provided a reliable census of local BHs, especially for the low-mass regime. This chapter then focuses on my contributions to a collaborative project in the search for IMBHs, in which I provided the BH mass estimations from the spiral arm morphology. This collaboration demonstrated, for the first time, the consistency between the predictions of several popular scaling relations in the low-mass regime. Chapter 3 explores the BH galaxy − connection beyond the bulge by using the Illustris simulation. This work showed Illustris establishes very tight correlations between the BH mass and large-scale properties of the host galaxy, not only for early-type galaxies but also late-type galaxies, regardless of bar morphology. These tight relations suggest that halo properties play an important role in determining those of the galaxy and its BH. The main focus of Chapters 4 and 5 is ring formation mechanisms, in particular the origin of Hoag-type galaxies. Studying such peculiar galaxies is important to address how different kinds of interactions contribute to different galaxy morphologies. Chapter vi 5 presents a photometric study of PGC 1000714, a galaxy with a fair resemblance to Hoag’s Object. This work has revealed, for the first time, an elliptical galaxy with two fairly round rings. A number of formation scenarios are discussed.