Effects Of Circum-nuclear Disk Gas Evolution And The Spin Of Central Black Holes

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution 3D simulations to investigate how star formation and feedback in circum-nuclear disks influence the gas dynamics and spin evolution of supermassive black holes, revealing moderate spin values.

Contribution

First 3D sub-parsec simulations incorporating star formation, feedback, and radiative transfer to analyze SMBH spin evolution in complex environments.

Findings

Star formation and feedback inject entropy into the surrounding medium.

Gas inflow inclination angles and accretion rates are affected by feedback.

Black hole spins tend to stabilize around 0.6-0.9, with moderate radiative efficiencies.

Abstract

Mass and spin are the only two parameters needed to completely characterize black holes in General Relativity. However, the interaction between black holes and their environment is where complexity lies, as the relevant physical processes occur over a large range of scales. That is particularly relevant in the case of super-massive black holes (SMBHs), hosted in galaxy centers, and surrounded by swirling gas and various generations of stars. These compete with the SMBH for gas consumption and affect both dynamics and thermodynamics of the gas itself. How the behavior of such fiery environment influence the angular momentum of the gas accreted onto SMBHs, and, hence, black-hole spins is uncertain. We explore the interaction between SMBHs and their environment via first 3D sub-parsec resolution simulations (ranging from 0.1 pc to 1 kpc scales) that study the evolution of the SMBH spin by including the effects of star formation, stellar feedback, radiative transfer, and metal pollution according to the proper stellar yields and lifetimes. This approach is crucial to investigate the impact of star formation processes and feedback effects on the angular momentum of the material that could accrete on the central hole. We find that star formation and feedback mechanisms can locally inject significant amounts of entropy in the surrounding medium, and impact on the inflow inclination angles and Eddington fractions. As a consequence, the resulting trends show upper-intermediate equilibrium values for the spin parameter, a, of about 0.6 - 0.9, corresponding to radiative efficiencies \epsilon = 9% - 15%. These results suggest that star formation feedback taking place in the circum-nuclear disk during the in-fall cannot induce alone very strong chaotic trends in the gas flow, quite independently from the different numerical parameters.