Black Hole Accretion in a Clumpy, Bursty High-Redshift Galaxy

This animation shows how the mass of the central supermassive black hole grows relative to the stellar mass of the host galaxy in one of the simulations from Anglés-Alcázar et al. (2017b). The animation shows how the black hole accretion rate at early times is very intermittent due to repeated evacuation of gas from the galactic nucleus by stellar feedback. At later times, the galaxy develops a stable gaseous nuclear disk which fuels the black hole at a more steady rate.

At the end of the simulation, the supermassive black hole has a mass similar to what is expected based on scaling relations observed in the local universe for the stellar mass of the galactic bulge. The simulation shown here follows a main halo of total mass ~10^12.5 Msun z=2, representative of luminous quasars at that redshift.

© Philip Hopkins 2015