We have a new paper out now on arXiv and submitted to the MNRAS: Winds and feedback from supermassive black holes accreting at low rates: Hydrodynamical treatment. This paper is the outcome of my MSc dissertation.
In this work we studied how accreting supermassive black holes generate winds that can potentially interact with the host galaxy. Our target was an active galactic nuclei (AGN) with very low accretion rates, like the famous M87*. Can these underfed systems generate powerful winds that will change the fate of the whole galaxy?
We performed diverse simulations of accretion disc flows around Schwarzschild black holes under an hydrodynamic treatment. Our simulations were some of the longest ones of our knowledge. The results show that some systems can create powerful thermally driven black hole winds that can be related to what we call “AGN feedback”. AGN feedback can be understood as the interaction between the ejected material/energy from the accretion flow and the host galaxy, this effect is crucial to understand galaxy evolution and currently it is a very active topic of research in astronomy. With this work we explored the possibility of thermally driven winds as a mechanism to explain this effect.
In the video below we show one of the simulations. On the top we have the gas density and each horizontal panel is the same disc but with different zoom levels, the scale is in Schwarzschild radius. On the bottom of the video we plot the wind efficiency. In practical terms, higher values here indicate stronger material ejection and production of more powerful winds.
For more details, please read our paper.
This work was supported in part by FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) under grant 2017/01461-2 and grant 2016/24857-6.
Black Hole Group 