Growth and activity of black holes in galaxy mergers with varying mass ratios

By Pedro R. Capelo, M. Volonteri, M. Dotti, J. Bellovary, Lucio Mayer, Fabio Governato. 2014

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study supermassive black holes (BHs) in merging galaxies, using a suite of hydrodynamical simulations with very high spatial (~10 pc) and temporal (~1 Myr) resolution, where we vary the initial mass ratio, the orbital configuration, and the gas fraction. (i) We address the question of when and why, during a merger, increased BH accretion occurs, quantifying gas inflows and BH accretion rates. (ii) We also quantify the relative effectiveness in inducing AGN activity of merger-related versus secular-related causes, by studying different stages of the encounter: the stochastic (or early) stage, the (proper) merger stage, and the remnant (or late) stage. (iii) We assess which galaxy mergers preferentially enhance BH accretion, finding that the initial mass ratio is the most important factor. (iv) We study the evolution of the BH masses, finding that the BH mass contrast tends to decrease in minor mergers and to increase in major mergers. This effect hints at the existence of a preferential range of mass ratios for BHs in the final pairing stages. (v) In both merging and dynamically quiescent galaxies, the gas accreted by the BH is not necessarily the gas with $low$ angular momentum, but the gas that $loses$ angular momentum.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d35bcc7e27318a491c027eea502536d89de4ebf

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

1. M. Volonteri
2. Y. Dubois
3. Zoltán Haiman
4. C. Pichon
5. J. Devriendt
6. L. Hernquist
7. A. Sesana
8. P. Hopkins

In Instrumentation

1. Y. Dubois
2. M. Volonteri
3. C. Pichon
4. J. Devriendt
5. Zoltán Haiman
6. A. Sesana
7. M. Colpi
8. M. Dotti

Citations in the corpus

• The quest for dual and binary supermassive black holes: A multi-messenger view (2019, background): “secondary galaxy is tidally disrupted far from the centre of the primary, it can deliver a stalling BH at a few hundred pc separations that will hardly decay efficiently afterwards (e.g. Callegari et al., 2009; Capelo et al., 2015).”
• The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, background): “Secondly, only mergers with a mass ratio sufficiently close to unity trigger AGN activity on both BHs (e.g. >1: 6 in Capelo et al. 2015).”