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Published March 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Simulating galaxy formation with black hole driven thermal and kinetic feedback

Abstract

The inefficiency of star formation in massive elliptical galaxies is widely believed to be caused by the interactions of an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with the surrounding gas. Achieving a sufficiently rapid reddening of moderately massive galaxies without expelling too many baryons has however proven difficult for hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation, prompting us to explore a new model for the accretion and feedback effects of supermassive black holes. For high-accretion rates relative to the Eddington limit, we assume that a fraction of the accreted rest mass energy heats the surrounding gas thermally, similar to the 'quasar mode' in previous work. For low-accretion rates, we invoke a new, pure kinetic feedback model that imparts momentum to the surrounding gas in a stochastic manner. These two modes of feedback are motivated both by theoretical conjectures for the existence of different types of accretion flows as well as recent observational evidence for the importance of kinetic AGN winds in quenching galaxies. We find that a large fraction of the injected kinetic energy in this mode thermalizes via shocks in the surrounding gas, thereby providing a distributed heating channel. In cosmological simulations, the resulting model produces red, non-star-forming massive elliptical galaxies, and achieves realistic gas fractions, black hole growth histories and thermodynamic profiles in large haloes.

Additional Information

© 2016 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Received: 12 July 2016. Revision Received: 16 October 2016. Accepted: 11 November 2016. Published: 22 November 2016. The authors thank Peter Behroozi for providing his data and for useful advice, as well as Kevin Schaal for providing his shock finding algorithm. RW, VS and RP acknowledge support through the European Research Council under ERC-StG grant EXAGAL-308037. RW, VS and RP would like to thank the Klaus Tschira Foundation. RW acknowledges support by the IMPRS for Astronomy and Cosmic Physics at the University of Heidelberg. SG and PT acknowledge support provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51341.001-A and HF2-51384.001-A, respectively, awarded by the STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. LH acknowledges support from NASA grant NNX12AC67G and NSF grant AST-1312095. Simulations were run on the HazelHen supercomputer at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) as part of project GCS-ILLU of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).

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Published - stw2944.pdf

Submitted - 1607.03486.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 25, 2023