Radiative Feedback from Massive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies: AGN Flaring and Central Starburst Fueled by Recycled Gas

By Luca Ciotti, Jeremiah P. Ostriker. 2007

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We show how the observed AGN radiative output from massive black holes at the centers of elliptical galaxies affects the hot ISM of these systems with the aid of a high-resolution hydrodynamical code, where the cooling and heating functions include photoionization plus Compton heating. Radiative heating is a key factor in the self-regulated coevolution of massive BHs and their host galaxies, and (1) the mass accumulated by the central BH is limited by feedback to the range observed today and (2) relaxation instabilities occur so that duty cycles are small enough (≲0.03) to account for the very small fraction of massive ellipticals observed to be in the "on" QSO phase, when the accretion luminosity approaches the Eddington luminosity. The duty cycle of the hot bubbles inflated at the galactic center during major accretion episodes is of the order of ≳0.1-0.4. Major accretion episodes caused by cooling flows in the recycled gas produced by normal stellar evolution trigger nuclear starbursts coincident with AGN flaring. Overall, in the bursting phase (1 ≲ z ≲ 3), the duty cycle of the BH in its "on" phase is of the order of percents and is unobscured approximately one-third of the time, the obscuration occurring during dusty starbursts. Roughly half of the recycled gas from dying stars is ejected as galactic winds, half is consumed in central starbursts, and less than 1% is accreted onto the central BH. Mechanical energy output from nonrelativistic gas winds integrates to 2.3 × 1059 ergs, with most of it caused by broad-line AGN outflows. We predict the typical properties of the very metal-rich poststarburst central regions and show that the resulting surface density profiles are well described by Sérsic profiles.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c2cfb7f3a740df1a8852111c44ecf37f29ea1fe

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Compaction and quenching of high-z galaxies in cosmological simulations: blue and red nuggets (2014, background): “…into stars, the associated gas loss via outflows driven by stellar feedback (e.g. Dekel & Silk 1986; Murray, Quataert & Thompson 2005) or AGN feedback (e.g. Ciotti & Ostriker 2007; Cattaneo et al. 2009, for a review), and possibly a slowdown of gas supply to the centre (Feldmann & Mayer 2014).”
Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “can be found and the accretion flow oscillates between active and inactive phases (Cowie et al. 1978; Ciotti & Ostriker 1997, 2001, 2007; Yuan et al. 2009b).”
Bimodal gas accretion in the Horizon–MareNostrum galaxy formation simulation (2008, background): “…strong AGN activity is seen in galaxies with intense star formation activity (Wild et al. 2007; Cid Fernandes et al. 2001), demonstrating that AGN and star formation co-exist, although this could be just a shortlived phase (Kauffmann et al. 2003; Schawinski et al. 2007; Ciotti & Ostriker 2007).”
A model for cosmological simulations of galaxy formation physics: multi-epoch validation (2013, methodology): “For AGN, this provides a channel of non-thermal/non-mechanical feedback (e.g., Sazonov et al. 2005; Ciotti & Ostriker 2007; Hambrick et al. 2011; Kim et al. 2011; Gnedin & Hollon 2012).”
DISSIPATION AND EXTRA LIGHT IN GALACTIC NUCLEI. IV. EVOLUTION IN THE SCALING RELATIONS OF SPHEROIDS (2008, background): “The gas will probably reflect that initially brought in from merging disks, but could in principle also stem from new cooling or stellar mass loss in the elliptical (see e.g. Ciotti & Ostriker 2007).”
MOMENTUM DRIVING: WHICH PHYSICAL PROCESSES DOMINATE ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS FEEDBACK? (2010, background): “Silk & Nusser (2010) also consider the importance of radiative momentum driven winds on galactic and cluster scales but limit the input to L/c, which can be considerably less than allowed in the optically thick case by Ciotti & Ostriker (2007) or DeBuhr et al. (2009).”
Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. II. Scaling Relations at z = 0.36 (2007, background): “…models and is believed to hold the key to solving several astrophysical problems, such as the role of feedback from nuclear activity in suppressing star formation in massive galaxies (e.g., Granato et al. 2004; Di Matteo et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2006; Malbon et al. 2006; Ciotti & Ostriker 2007).”
Multiwavelength Study of Massive Galaxies at z ~ 2. II. Widespread Compton-thick Active Galactic Nuclei and the Concurrent Growth of Black Holes and Bulges (2007, background): “If the energetic emission from accretion around the BH is large enough, the galaxy can be cleared out of its gas either via heating (e.g., Ciotti & Ostriker 1997; 2007) or accretion related outflows as in BAL quasars (e.g., Chartas et al. 2007), thereby preventing further gas accretion.”
Tracing the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes to z ∼ 3 with Herschel (2014, background): “…processes (Kormendy & Kennicutt 2004), which in turn include internal secular evolution (i.e. large-scale disc instabilities and bars) and external secular evolution (galaxy interactions) and inflow of recycled cold gas from old stellar populations (Ciotti & Ostriker 2007; Ciotti et al. 2010).”
Hyper-Eddington accretion flows on to massive black holes (2015, methodology): “Following Ciotti & Ostriker (2007), we adopt a simple model of dust opacity against optical and infrared radiation κoptdust = 300 1 + (T/104 K) ( Z Z⊙ ) cm2 g−1, (40) and κIRdust = κ opt dust/150, where the gas temperature is set to T = 104 K.”
FEEDBACK FROM CENTRAL BLACK HOLES IN ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES. III. MODELS WITH BOTH RADIATIVE AND MECHANICAL FEEDBACK (2010, unknown): “We can summarize the main results of our previous work as follows: 1) SNIa are energetically quite important and will drive winds from elliptical galaxies (e.g, Ciotti et al. 1991; Ciotti & Ostriker 2007, hereafter CO07) but are only effective on the kpc scale, where the gas densities are low.”
Supermassive black hole formation by direct collapse: keeping protogalactic gas H2 free in dark matter haloes with virial temperatures Tvir > rsim 104 K (2009, background): “…maximum allowed steady accretion rate is significantly reduced, at least in spherical symmetry (e.g. Milosavljevic et al. 2009a), suggesting that accretion must be intermittent, with a time–averaged rate well below the Eddington–limit (e.g. Ciotti & Ostriker 2001, 2007; Milosavljevic et al. 2009b).”
The illustris simulation: Public data release (2015, methodology): “ et al. (2010); Springel and Hernquist (2003). BH and AGN feedback: Di Matteo et al. (2008); Springel et al. (2005a); Di Matteo et al. (2005); Sijacki et al. (2007, 2009); Vogelsberger et al. (2013); Ciotti and Ostriker (2007); Sazonov et al. (2005); Yu and Tremaine (2002). postprocessing, these cat”
GRAVITATIONAL HEATING HELPS MAKE MASSIVE GALAXIES RED AND DEAD (2009, background): “In addition to the quenching by shock-heated gas above a critical halo mass (Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Birnboim et al. 2007), potential quenching mechanisms include the feedback from AGNs (Ciotti & Ostriker 2007), gaseous major mergers triggering star burst and/or quasar activity (e.g Naab et al. 2006;”
Dissipation and Extra Light in Galactic Nuclei. I. Gas-Rich Merger Remnants (2008, background): “…not be the only source of dissipation (for example, stellar mass loss may replenish the gas supply and lead to new dissipational bursts; see, e.g., Ciotti & Ostriker 2007), but for our purposes, all dissipational star formation will appear similar when observed and have the same effects (we are…”
A GLOBAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL RADIATION MAGNETO-HYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATION OF SUPER-EDDINGTON ACCRETION DISKS (2014, background): “Such feedback may play a critical role on the growth of black holes in the early universe and the evolution of the host galaxies (Ciotti & Ostriker 2007; Ciotti et al. 2010; Choi et al. 2012).”
THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS (2009, background): “Finally, if quenching is initiated by low luminosity AGN feedback, are mergers even required (e.g., Ciotti & Ostriker 2007)?”
X-shooter reveals powerful outflows in z ∼ 1.5 X-ray selected obscured quasi-stellar objects (2014, background): “…by local processes such as accretion triggered gas inflows or disk instabilities likely induced by minor mergers or galaxies encounters (see Ciotti & Ostriker 2007; Bournaud et al. 2011; Cen 2012), among the most luminous sources (Lbol > 1046 erg s−1), major galaxy mergers are indicated…”
The LABOCA survey of the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South: clustering of submillimetre galaxies (2011, background): “…secular instabilities (e.g. Mo, Mao & White 1998; Bower et al. 2006; Genzel et al. 2008) or accretion of recycled cold gas from evolved stars (Ciotti & Ostriker 2007; Ciotti, Ostriker & Proga 2010), and is similar to the mass at which galaxy populations transition from star forming to…”