Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation

By R. Weinberger, Volker Springel, Rüdiger Pakmor, D. Nelson, Shy Genel, A. Pillepich, M. Vogelsberger, F. Marinacci, Jill P. Naiman, P. Torrey and 1 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2017

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We study the population of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their effects on massive central galaxies in the IllustrisTNG cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation. The employed model for SMBH growth and feedback assumes a two-mode scenario in which the feedback from active galactic nuclei occurs through a kinetic, comparatively efficient mode at low accretion rates relative to the Eddington limit, and in the form of a thermal, less efficient mode at high accretion rates. We show that the quenching of massive central galaxies happens coincidently with kinetic-mode feedback, consistent with the notion that active supermassive black cause the low specific star formation rates observed in massive galaxies. However, major galaxy mergers are not responsible for initiating most of the quenching events in our model. Up to black hole masses of about $10^{8.5}\,{\rm M}_\odot$, the dominant growth channel for SMBHs is in the thermal mode. Higher mass black holes stay mainly in the kinetic mode and gas accretion is self-regulated via their feedback, which causes their Eddington ratios to drop, with SMBH mergers becoming the main channel for residual mass growth. As a consequence, the quasar luminosity function is dominated by rapidly accreting, moderately massive black holes in the thermal mode. We show that the associated growth history of SMBHs produces a low-redshift quasar luminosity function and a redshift zero black hole mass-stellar bulge mass relation in good agreement with observations, whereas the simulation tends to over-predict the high-redshift quasar luminosity function.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1def34b04c1e96f20dbcaff4023a09d3ec564f3b

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Citations in the corpus

First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, background): “…the bolometric luminosities of accreting black holes under the assumption of a Ṁ-dependent radiative efficiency (following Churazov et al. 2005; Weinberger et al. 2018) as Lbol = r Ṁ c2 ; λedd > 0.1 10 λ2edd LEdd ; λedd < 0.1 , (5) where λedd = Ṁ/Ṁedd is the Eddington ratio, Ledd =…”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, result): “(iv) Illustris-TNG uses, at maximum, 200% of the AGN bolometric luminosity (assuming a 10% radiative efficiency), whereas for our model, the maximum is approximately a third of the bolometric luminosity.”
The star formation activity of IllustrisTNG galaxies: main sequence, UVJ diagram, quenched fractions, and systematics (2018, background): “…al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014b; Genel et al. 2014; Sijacki et al. 2015; Nelson et al. 2015) by including, among others, a new black-hole feedback model, magnetohydrodynamics, and a new scheme for galactic winds (see Weinberger et al. 2018; Pillepich et al. 2018a, for details on the TNG model).”