TY - JOUR
T1 - Cosmological simulations of quasar fueling to subparsec scales using lagrangian hyper-refinement
AU - Anglés-Alcázar, Daniel
AU - Quataert, Eliot
AU - Hopkins, Philip F.
AU - Somerville, Rachel S.
AU - Hayward, Christopher C.
AU - Faucher-Giguère, Claude André
AU - Bryan, Greg L.
AU - Kereš, Dušan
AU - Hernquist, Lars
AU - Stone, James M.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Ena Choi, Romeel Davé Robert Feldmann, John Forbes, Shy Genel, Melanie Habouzit, Yan-Fei Jiang, Yuan Li, Xiangcheng Ma, Eve Ostriker, Roxana Pop, Julissa Rojas-Sandoval, Matthew Smith, Tjitske Starkenburg, Kung-Yi Su, Paul Torrey, Rainer Weinberger, and Sarah Wellons for many insightful discussions and suggestions during the development of this work. We thank the referee for a detailed and constructive review that helped improve the paper. We acknowledge outstanding support by the Scientific Computing Core group and the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute as part of the SMAUG project, which are supported by the Simons Foundation. D.A.A. was supported in part by NSF grant AST-2009687. E.Q. was supported in part by a Simons Investigator Award from the Simons Foundation and by NSF grant AST-1715070. Support for P.F.H. was provided by NSF Collaborative Research Grants 1715847 & 1911233, NSF CAREER grant 1455342, NASA grants 80NSSC18K0562, JPL 1589742. C.A.F.G. was supported by NSF through grants AST-1517491, AST-1715216, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grant 17-ATP17-0067; and by a Cottrell Scholar Award and a Scialog Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. G.L.B. was supported in part by the NSF through grants OAC-1835509 and AST-2006176, as well as support from the STScI under NASA contract NAS5-26555. D.K. was supported by NSF grant AST-1715101 and the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The simulations were run on Flatiron Institute’s research computing facilities (Gordon-Simons, Popeye, and Iron compute clusters), supported by the Simons Foundation, and XSEDE allocation TG-AST160048, supported by NSF grant ACI-1053575. Additional numerical calculations were run on the Caltech compute cluster “Wheeler,” allocations FTA-Hopkins supported by the NSF and TACC, and NASA HEC SMD-16-7592.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Institute of Physics Publishing. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/8/20
Y1 - 2021/8/20
N2 - We present cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of a quasar-mass halo (Mhalo ≈ 1012.5M⊙ at z = 2) that for the first time resolve gas transport down to the inner 0.1 pc surrounding the central massive black hole. We model a multiphase interstellar medium including stellar feedback by supernovae, stellar winds, and radiation, and a hyper- Lagrangian refinement technique increasing the resolution dynamically approaching the black hole. We do not include black hole feedback. We show that the subpc inflow rate (1) can reach ∼6M⊙ yr-1 roughly in steady state during the epoch of peak nuclear gas density (z ∼ 2), sufficient to power a luminous quasar, (2) is highly time variable in the pre-quasar phase, spanning 0.001-10M⊙ yr-1 on Myr timescales, and (3) is limited to short (∼2 Myr) active phases (0.01-0.1M⊙ yr-1) followed by longer periods of inactivity at lower nuclear gas density and late times (z ∼ 1), owing to the formation of a hot central cavity. Inflowing gas is primarily cool, rotational support dominates over turbulence and thermal pressure, and star formation can consume as much gas as provided by inflows across 1 pc-10 kpc. Gravitational torques from multiscale stellar non-axisymmetries dominate angular momentum transport over gas self-torquing and pressure gradients, with accretion weakly dependent on black hole mass. Subpc inflow rates correlate with nuclear (but decouple from global) star formation and can exceed the Eddington rate by ×10. The black hole can move ∼10 pc from the galaxy center on ∼0.1 Myr. Accreting gas forms pc-scale, rotationally supported, obscuring structures often misaligned with the galaxy-scale disk. These simulations open a new avenue to investigate black hole-galaxy coevolution.
AB - We present cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of a quasar-mass halo (Mhalo ≈ 1012.5M⊙ at z = 2) that for the first time resolve gas transport down to the inner 0.1 pc surrounding the central massive black hole. We model a multiphase interstellar medium including stellar feedback by supernovae, stellar winds, and radiation, and a hyper- Lagrangian refinement technique increasing the resolution dynamically approaching the black hole. We do not include black hole feedback. We show that the subpc inflow rate (1) can reach ∼6M⊙ yr-1 roughly in steady state during the epoch of peak nuclear gas density (z ∼ 2), sufficient to power a luminous quasar, (2) is highly time variable in the pre-quasar phase, spanning 0.001-10M⊙ yr-1 on Myr timescales, and (3) is limited to short (∼2 Myr) active phases (0.01-0.1M⊙ yr-1) followed by longer periods of inactivity at lower nuclear gas density and late times (z ∼ 1), owing to the formation of a hot central cavity. Inflowing gas is primarily cool, rotational support dominates over turbulence and thermal pressure, and star formation can consume as much gas as provided by inflows across 1 pc-10 kpc. Gravitational torques from multiscale stellar non-axisymmetries dominate angular momentum transport over gas self-torquing and pressure gradients, with accretion weakly dependent on black hole mass. Subpc inflow rates correlate with nuclear (but decouple from global) star formation and can exceed the Eddington rate by ×10. The black hole can move ∼10 pc from the galaxy center on ∼0.1 Myr. Accreting gas forms pc-scale, rotationally supported, obscuring structures often misaligned with the galaxy-scale disk. These simulations open a new avenue to investigate black hole-galaxy coevolution.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac09e8
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac09e8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113921074
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 917
SP - 917
EP - 953
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 2
ER -