Decomposition of the central structure of NGC 2273 in the NIR: A case study.

The Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 2273 is a prime target to explore how active nuclei can be fed. It has a star‐forming innermost nuclear ring with a radius of 0.33kpc from where material may be funneled to the supermassive black hole in its center. In this article, we discuss high‐resolution adaptive optics aided JHKs images of NGC 2273 taken with the Large Binocular Telescope. Using Galfit we decomposed the innermost part of NGC 2273 into a core, a disk, and a ring using 58 parameters, 44 of them were used to describe the ring. The stellar mass of the ring was found to be 12 ×108M⊙$$ \times 1{0}^8{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot } $$, a factor of 10 higher than its molecular gas mass. A continuous gas flow via the main stellar bar of NGC 2273 during the lifetime of the bar of up to 10 M⊙yr−1$$ {\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1} $$ is required to provide the fuel for the formation of the stars unless the star formation efficiency is on the order of 10%. This does not affect the fueling of the nuclear source as the amount of molecular gas required for this low‐luminosity active galaxy to achieve this is on the order of 104M⊙$$ 1{0}^4{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot } $$ only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]