Alignments Of Black Holes With Their Warped Accretion Disks And Episodic Lifetimes Of Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper investigates how warped accretion disks influence black hole spin alignment and explores how SMBH spin distributions can inform us about the episodic lifetimes of AGNs, using a simplified global model.

Contribution

It introduces a model that accounts for finite disk sizes and episodic AGN activity to study black hole spin evolution and alignment processes.

Findings

Black hole spin evolution is highly sensitive to AGN episodic lifetimes.

Spin distributions can constrain AGN episodic lifetimes.

The model can be integrated into semi-analytic black hole growth simulations.

Abstract

Warped accretion disks have attracted intensive attention because of their critical role on shaping the spin of supermassive massive black holes (SMBHs) through the Bardeen-Petterson effect, a general relativistic effect that leads to final alignments or anti-alignments between black holes and warped accretion disks. We study such alignment processes by explicitly taking into account the finite sizes of accretion disks and the episodic lifetimes of AGNs that delineate the duration of gas fueling onto accretion disks. We employ an approximate global model to simulate the evolution of accretion disks, allowing to determine the gravitomagnetic torque that drives the alignments in a quite simple way. We then track down the evolutionary paths for mass and spin of black holes both in a single activity episode and over a series of episodes. Given with randomly and isotropically oriented gas fueling over episodes, we calculate the spin evolution with different episodic lifetimes and find that it is quite sensitive to the lifetimes. We therefore propose that spin distribution of SMBHs can place constraints on the episodic lifetimes of AGNs and vice versa. Applications of our results on the observed spin distributions of SMBHs and the observed episodic lifetimes of AGNs are discussed, although both the measurements at present are yet ambiguous to draw a firm conclusion. Our prescription can be easily incorporated into semi-analytic models for black hole growth and spin evolution.