How Ram Pressure Drives Radial Gas Motions in the Surviving Disk

TL;DR

This study uses hydrodynamical simulations to show that ram pressure stripping in galaxy clusters enhances gas inflow to galaxy centers, potentially affecting nuclear activity and black hole growth.

Contribution

It reveals the mechanisms by which ram pressure influences gas dynamics and accretion in cluster galaxies, highlighting the limitations of current black hole accretion models.

Findings

Ram pressure increases gas inflow regardless of wind angle.

Mixing of interstellar and intracluster media drives inflow.

Torque models underestimate black hole accretion compared to Bondi-Hoyle.

Abstract

Galaxy evolution can be dramatically affected by the environment, especially by the dense environment of a galaxy cluster. Recent observational studies show that massive galaxies undergoing strong ram pressure stripping (RPS) also show an enhanced frequency of nuclear activity. Here, we investigate this topic using a suite of wind-tunnel hydrodynamical simulations of an individual massive $M_\text{star} = 10^{11} M_\odot$ disk galaxy with 39 pc resolution and including star formation and stellar feedback. We find that RPS increases the inflow of gas to the galaxy centre regardless of the wind impact angle. This increase is driven by the mixing of interstellar and non-rotating intracluster media at all wind angles, and by increased torque on the inner disk gas, mainly from local pressure gradients when the ICM wind has an edge-on component. In turn, the increase in pressure torques is driven by rising gradient of ram pressure. We estimate the black hole (BH) accretion using Bondi-Hoyle and torque models, and compare it with the mass flux in the central 140 pc region. We find that the torque model estimates much less accretion onto the BH of a RPS galaxy than the Bondi-Hoyle estimator. However, we argue that both models are incomplete because the commonly used torque model does not account for torques caused by the gas distribution or local pressure gradients and the Bondi-Hoyle estimator depends on the the sound speed of the hot gas, which includes the ICM in stripped galaxies, thus a new estimator would be required.