Bridging Scales in Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: Studying Supermassive Black Holes by@magnetosphere
Bridging Scales in Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: Studying Supermassive Black Holes
by Magnetosphere: Maintaining Habitability on EarthMay 9th, 2024
Too Long; Didn't Read
Most nearby galaxies are found to harbor central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) whose masses are correlated with properties of the stellar components of their hosts (e.g., Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Kormendy & Ho 2013). However, the details of how gas flows into the galactic nucleus from large cosmic distances and how the SMBH in turn imparts feedback into the galaxy remain coupled unresolved problems.
This paper is available on Arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
Authors:
(1) Hyerin Cho (조혜린), Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;
(2) Ben S. Prather, CCS-2, Los Alamos National Laboratory, PO Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA;
(3) Ramesh Narayan, enter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;
(4) Priyamvada Natarajan, Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, Department of Astronomy, Yale University, Kline Tower, 266 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA and Department of Physics, Yale University, P.O. Box 208121, New Haven, CT 06520, USA;
(5) Kung-Yi Su, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;
(6) Angelo Ricarte, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;
(7) Koushik Chatterjee, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Table of Links
Feedback Via Reconnection-Driven Convection
Appendix
A. GRMHD Primer and Definitions
C. Resolution and Initial Condition Study
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Accretion (14), Active galactic nuclei (16), Bondi accretion (174), Schwarzschild black holes (1433), Supermassive black holes (1663), Magnetohydrodynamical simulations (1966)
1. INTRODUCTION
Most nearby galaxies are found to harbor central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) whose masses are correlated with properties of the stellar components of their hosts (e.g., Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Kormendy & Ho 2013). However, the details of how gas flows into the galactic nucleus from large cosmic distances and how the SMBH in turn imparts feedback into the galaxy remain coupled unresolved problems.
Recently, some attempts to connect these disparate scales have been made using nested simulations where each smaller-scale simulation is initialized from the next larger-scale simulation (e.g., Hopkins & Quataert 2010; Ressler et al. 2020; Guo et al. 2023); or by adopting Lagrangian hyper-refinement methods (e.g., Angl´esAlc´azar et al. 2021; Hopkins et al. 2023); or by pushing out the simulation regime to larger scales (e.g., Lalakos et al. 2022; Kaaz et al. 2023).
While successful in studying the process of accretion, feedback from the SMBH has not been followed out to galaxy scales in prior work because either the communication between scales is only directed inwards or because of the inability to include the entire galaxy and the black hole.
We employ here a multi-zone computational method which represents a first attempt to not only follow accretion flows but also trace feedback across 7 orders of magnitude from the event horizon to galactic scales. With this method, we study purely hydrodynamic Bondi accretion as well as the magnetized Bondi problem.
The outline of this Letter is as follows: In Section 2 we give an overview of the numerical scheme that captures a wide dynamic range simultaneously. In Section 3, we present a purely hydrodynamic simulation and test our numerical scheme by comparing against the general relativistic (GR) analytical solution.
In Section 4 we include magnetic fields for a more realistic representation of the environment of SMBHs and study how Bondi accretion is modified. We discuss our findings of feedback via convection in Section 5 and summarize conclusions of our study in Section 6. Additional details are presented in a set of short appendices: various GRMHD quantities are defined in Appendix A, the details of the simulation set-up are outlined in Appendix B, and a resolution and initial condition study is presented in Appendix C.
This paper is available on Arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
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