Self-regulated growth of supermassive black holes by a dual jet-heating active galactic nucleus feedback mechanism: methods, tests and implications for cosmological simulations

By Y. Dubois, J. Devriendt, A. Slyz, Romain Teyssier. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2011

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a new sub-grid model for the growth of supermassive Black Holes (BHs) and their associated Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) feedback in hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. Assuming that BHs are created in the early stages of galaxy formation, they grow by mergers and accretion of gas at a Eddington-limited Bondi accretion rate. However this growth is regulated by AGN feedback which we model using two different modes: a quasar-heating mode when accretion rates onto the BHs are comparable to the Eddington rate, and a radio-jet mode at lower accretion rates. In other words, our feedback model deposits energy as a succession of thermal bursts and jet outflows depending on the properties of the gas surrounding the BHs. We assess the plausibility of such a model by comparing our results to observational measurements of the coevolution of BHs and their host galaxy properties, and check their robustness with respect to numerical resolution. We show that AGN feedback must be a crucial physical ingredient for the formation of massive galaxies as it appears to be the only physical mechanism able to efficiently prevent the accumulation of and/or expel cold gas out of halos/galaxies and significantly suppress star formation. Our model predicts that the relationship between BHs and their host galaxy mass evolves as a function of redshift, because of the vigorous accretion of cold material in the early Universe that drives Eddington-limited accretion onto BHs. Quasar activity is also enhanced at high redshift. However, as structures grow in mass and lose their cold material through star formation and efficient BH feedback ejection, the AGN activity in the low-redshift Universe becomes more and more dominated by the radio mode, which powers jets through the hot circum-galactic medium.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Hernquist
2. Volker Springel
3. P. Hopkins
4. M. Vogelsberger
5. Shy Genel
6. P. Torrey
7. R. Dav'e
8. D. Nelson

In Instrumentation

1. L. Hernquist
2. Volker Springel
3. P. Hopkins
4. Shy Genel
5. M. Vogelsberger
6. P. Torrey
7. D. Nelson
8. R. Dav'e

Citations in the corpus

• The Illustris simulation: the evolving population of black holes across cosmic time (2014, result): “These results were further confirmed by several independent groups and more recent simulations (Booth & Schaye 2009; Dubois et al. 2012; Hirschmann et al. 2014; Khandai et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2014).”
• The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, methodology): “BHs release energy in a heating or jet mode (respectively “quasar” and “radio” mode) when the accretion rate is respectively above and below one per cent of Eddington, with efficiencies tuned to match the BH-galaxy scaling relations at z = 0 (see Dubois et al. 2012, for details).”
• Black hole evolution – I. Supernova-regulated black hole growth (2015, methodology): “…on the galaxy mass content, the circumgalactic gas properties and the halo mass distribution can E-mail: dubois@iap.fr be dramatic (Di Matteo, Springel & Hernquist 2005; Bower et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Sijacki et al. 2007; Booth & Schaye 2009; Dubois et al. 2010, 2012; Teyssier et al. 2011).”
• Cosmic Dawn (CoDa): the first radiation-hydrodynamics simulation of reionization and galaxy formation in the Local Universe (2015, background): “Such sources could already be in place in rare massive proto-clusters during reionization (Dubois et al. 2012b,a).”
• Cosmological simulations of black hole growth: AGN luminosities and downsizing (2013, background): “Such mechanisms are for example investigated by Choi et al. (2012), Debuhr, Quataert & Ma (2012), Barai et al. (2014) and Dubois et al. (2012) employing simulations of isolated galaxies or galaxy mergers.”
• AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies (2013, methodology): “Such galaxies exist but are rare objects in the real Universe (Williams et al. 2010).”
• Euclid preparation (2021, methodology): “The efficiency of these energy release modes is tuned to match the observed BH-galaxy scaling relation at z = 0 (see Dubois et al. 2012, for more details).”
• Gravitational torque-driven black hole growth and feedback in cosmological simulations (2016, background): “…Di Matteo, Springel & Hernquist 2005; Hopkins et al. 2005, 2006, 2007a; Springel, Di Matteo & Hernquist 2005; Sijacki et al. 2007, 2015; Booth & Schaye 2009; Filloux et al. 2010; Choi et al. 2012; Debuhr, Quataert & Ma 2012; Dubois et al. 2012; Rosas-Guevara et al. 2015; Steinborn et al. 2015).”
• Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, background): “…Quataert & Murray 2011), black hole growth and feedback (Springel, Di Matteo & Hernquist 2005a; Sijacki & Springel 2006; Booth & Schaye 2009; Dubois et al. 2012), magnetic fields (Dolag 2006; Pakmor, Marinacci & Springel 2014), and cosmic rays (Jubelgas et al. 2008; Vazza, Gheller &…”
• Jet-induced star formation in gas-rich galaxies (2011, background): “…radio and/or quasar mode) is often thought to heat or expel gas from the galaxy and to be acting mostly on the circum-galactic gas (e.g. Springel et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2006; Sijacki et al. 2007; Bower et al. 2008; Booth & Schaye 2009; Dubois et al. 2011), lowering the star formation rates.”
• Introducing the Illustris Project: simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe (2014, background): “…2012), stellar feedback (e.g. Navarro & White 1993; Springel & Hernquist 2003; Stinson et al. 2013), and feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs; e.g. Di Matteo, Springel & Hernquist 2005; Springel et al. 2005b; Sijacki et al. 2007; Booth & Schaye 2009; Teyssier et al. 2011; Dubois et al. 2012).”
• Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, methodology): “Bellovary et al. (2011), Dubois et al. (2012a), Taylor & Kobayashi (2014), Dubois, Volonteri & Silk (2014) and Volonteri et al. (2016) instead seed BHs in high gas density peaks, in some cases with a metallicity criterion, with fixed BH mass in the range 10 ≤ M ≤ 105 M .”
• Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web (2014, methodology): “…there could be a significant amount of redistribution of angular momentum within the inner regions of haloes (Kimm et al. 2011; Danovich et al. 2012; Dubois et al. 2012b; Kassin et al. 2012a,b; Tillson et al. 2012), and as a consequence, galaxies misalign with the spin of their host halo (see Fig.”
• Simulating galaxy formation with black hole driven thermal and kinetic feedback (2016, methodology): “…Brighenti & Mathews 2006; Brüggen et al. 2007; Cattaneo & Teyssier 2007; Sternberg et al. 2007; Sternberg & Soker 2009; Gaspari et al. 2011a,b, 2012; Li & Bryan 2014a,b; Li et al. 2015; Hillel & Soker 2016; Yang & Reynolds 2016a,b), or in cosmological simulations (Dubois et al. 2010, 2012, 2016).”
• The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, methodology): “A resolution study for this implementation has been done in Dubois et al. (2012), from 0.5 to 4 kpc varying the spatial resolution, and dark matter (DM) mass resolution as well.”
• The quest for dual and binary supermassive black holes: A multi-messenger view (2019, background): “…Pillepich et al., 2018), magnetic fields (e.g. Pakmor et al., 2011; Pakmor and Springel, 2013), growth of SMBHs and their associated AGN feedback (e.g. Springel et al., 2005; Fabjan et al., 2010; Dubois et al., 2012; Rosas-Guevara et al., 2015; Steinborn et al., 2015; Weinberger et al., 2017).”
• Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, background): “…& Stasyszyn 2009; Pakmor, Bauer & Springel 2011; Hopkins & Raives 2016; Mocz et al. 2016) and the effects of & kpcscale gas outflows triggered by supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies (Dubois & Teyssier 2010; Dubois et al. 2012; Choi et al. 2012, 2014, 2015; Weinberger et al. 2017).”
• The Horizon-AGN simulation: evolution of galaxy properties over cosmic time (2016, methodology): “Nevertheless, both theoretical and observational work indicates that AGN are likely to play an important role in shaping galaxy evolution (e.g. Silk & Rees 1998; Bower et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Cattaneo et al. 2009; Kimm et al. 2012; Dubois et al. 2012).”