Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei

By Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, C. Faucher-Giguére, E. Quataert, P. Hopkins, Robert Feldmann, P. Torrey, Andrew Wetzel, Duvsan Kerevs Northwestern, Uc Berkeley, Caltech and 5 more. 2017

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce massive black holes (BHs) in the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project and perform high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of quasar-mass haloes [Mhalo(z = 2) ≈ 1012.5 M⊙] down to z = 1. These simulations model stellar feedback by supernovae, stellar winds and radiation, and BH growth using a gravitational torque-based prescription tied to the resolved properties of galactic nuclei. We do not include BH feedback. We show that early BH growth occurs through short (≲1 Myr) accretion episodes that can reach or even exceed the Eddington rate. In this regime, BH growth is limited by bursty stellar feedback continuously evacuating gas from galactic nuclei, and BHs remain undermassive in low-mass galaxies relative to the local MBH–Mbulgerelation. BH growth is more efficient at later times, when the nuclear stellar potential retains a significant gas reservoir, star formation becomes less bursty and galaxies settle into a more ordered state. BHs rapidly converge on to the observed scaling relations when the host reaches Mbulge ∼ 1010 M⊙. We show that resolving the effects of stellar feedback on the gas supply in the inner ∼100 pc of galaxies is necessary to accurately capture the growth of central BHs. Our simulations imply that bursty stellar feedback has important implications for BH–galaxy relations, AGN demographics and time variability, the formation of early quasars and massive BH mergers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/276d2ce616a211d964beeedc7a90aaf19c4f1d84

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Cool outflows in galaxies and their implications (2020, background): “…powerful enough to eject the gas out into the intergalactic medium (IGM; Oppenheimer et al. 2019; Davies et al. 2019; Keller et al. 2019), re-accretion of the enriched material ejected by neighboring galaxies may revive the star formation activity of the host galaxy (Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017).”
Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “…simulations of representative cosmological volumes (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2015; Dubois et al. 2016; Khandai et al. 2015; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017b; Tremmel et al. 2017b) it is possible to track the evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies through cosmic time and…”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, methodology): “…absorption in the CGM (Faucher-Giguere et al. 2015; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2016; Hafen et al. 2017); galactic outflows (Muratov et al. 2015, 2017; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017a); star-formation properties of galactic nuclei (Torrey et al. 2017); escape fractions of ionizing photons needed for…”
A JWST/NIRSpec First Census of Broad-line AGNs at z = 4–7: Detection of 10 Faint AGNs with M BH ∼ 106–108 M ⊙ and Their Host Galaxy Properties (2023, background): “Since theoretical models usually make predictions for the time evolution of the systems (e.g., Angl´es-Alc´azar et al. 2017; Toyouchi et al. 2021; Valentini et al. 2021; Zhu et al. 2022; Habouzit et al. 2022; Trinca et al. 2022; Inayoshi et al. 2022; Hu et al. 2022; Zhang et al. 2023a,b),…”
A New Sample of (Wandering) Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies from High-resolution Radio Observations (2019, background): “Recent simulations also suggest that dwarfs should contain relatively pristine BHs, due to supernova feedback stunting BH growth (Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017; Habouzit et al. 2017).”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, methodology): “In previous works, Anglés-Alcázar et al. (2015) and Anglés-Alcázar et al. (2017a) showed that the MBH − M∗ relation emerged naturally from the torque-limited accretion model, without or with AGN feedback, respectively.”