Toward Horizon-scale Accretion Onto Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies

TL;DR

This study uses advanced 3D hydrodynamic simulations to explore the complex, multi-scale accretion processes onto supermassive black holes in elliptical galaxies, revealing the dominance of hot gas at small scales and proposing a new subgrid accretion model.

Contribution

It introduces a GPU-accelerated simulation framework that captures accretion across six orders of magnitude in radius, providing new insights into the multi-phase gas dynamics and accretion rates near supermassive black holes.

Findings

Cold gas forms a rotational disk at intermediate radii.

Hot gas dominates accretion at the smallest scales.

Accretion rate near the horizon matches EHT observations.

Abstract

We present high-resolution, three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the fueling of supermassive black holes in elliptical galaxies from a turbulent medium on galactic scales, taking M87* as a typical case. The simulations use a new GPU-accelerated version of the Athena++ AMR code, and span more than 6 orders of magnitude in radius, reaching scales similar to the black hole horizon. The key physical ingredients are radiative cooling and a phenomenological heating model. We find that the accretion flow takes the form of multiphase gas at radii less than about a kpc. The cold gas accretion includes two dynamically distinct stages: the typical disk stage in which the cold gas resides in a rotationally supported disk and relatively rare chaotic stages ($\lesssim 10\%$ of the time) in which the cold gas inflows via chaotic streams. Though cold gas accretion dominates the time-averaged accretion rate at intermediate radii, accretion at the smallest radii is dominated by hot virialized gas at most times. The accretion rate scales with radius as $\dot{M}\propto r^{1/2}$ when hot gas dominates and we obtain $\dot{M}\simeq10^\mathrm{-4}-10^\mathrm{-3}\,M_\odot\,\mathrm{yr^{-1}}$ near the event horizon, similar to what is inferred from EHT observations. The orientation of the cold gas disk can differ significantly on different spatial scales. We propose a subgrid model for accretion in lower-resolution simulations in which the hot gas accretion rate is suppressed relative to the Bondi rate by $\sim (r_\mathrm{g}/r_{\rm Bondi})^{1/2}$. Our results can also provide more realistic initial conditions for simulations of black hole accretion at the event horizon scale.