Huffing, and puffing, and blowing your house in: Strong stellar winds interaction with a super massive black hole

TL;DR

This paper develops analytical and numerical models to study how stellar winds from massive stars interact with a supermassive black hole, revealing that equilibrium states are similar for different stellar orbit shapes and that analytical models can effectively predict complex wind behaviors.

Contribution

The paper introduces combined analytical and numerical models for stellar wind interactions with a supermassive black hole, demonstrating their agreement and utility in complex astrophysical systems.

Findings

Analytical and numerical results are in good agreement.

System reaches similar equilibrium states for circular and eccentric stellar orbits.

Analytical models can quickly predict properties of complex wind-black hole systems.

Abstract

We present analytic and numerical models of a cluster wind flow resulting from the interaction of stellar winds of massive stars, with a super massive black hole (SMBH). We consider the motion of the stars as well as the gravitational force of the SMBH. In the numerical simulations we consider two cases: the first one with the stars is in circular orbits, and the second one with the stars in eccentric orbits around the SMBH. We found that after the system reaches an equilibrium, the circular and elliptical cases are very similar. We found a very good agreement between the analytical and numerical results, not only from our numerical simulations but also from other high resolution numerical calculations. The analytical models are very interesting, since the properties of such complex systems involving strong winds and a massive compact object, can be rapidly inferred without the need of a numerical calculation.