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Published November 21, 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei

Abstract

We introduce massive black holes (BHs) in the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project and perform high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of quasar-mass haloes [Mhalo(z = 2) ≈ 10^(12.5) M_⊙] down to z = 1. These simulations model stellar feedback by supernovae, stellar winds and radiation, and BH growth using a gravitational torque-based prescription tied to the resolved properties of galactic nuclei. We do not include BH feedback. We show that early BH growth occurs through short (≲1 Myr) accretion episodes that can reach or even exceed the Eddington rate. In this regime, BH growth is limited by bursty stellar feedback continuously evacuating gas from galactic nuclei, and BHs remain undermassive in low-mass galaxies relative to the local M_(BH)–M_(bulge) relation. BH growth is more efficient at later times, when the nuclear stellar potential retains a significant gas reservoir, star formation becomes less bursty and galaxies settle into a more ordered state. BHs rapidly converge on to the observed scaling relations when the host reaches Mbulge ∼ 10^(10) M_⊙. We show that resolving the effects of stellar feedback on the gas supply in the inner ∼100 pc of galaxies is necessary to accurately capture the growth of central BHs. Our simulations imply that bursty stellar feedback has important implications for BH–galaxy relations, AGN demographics and time variability, the formation of early quasars and massive BH mergers.

Additional Information

© 2017 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2017 October 2. Received 2017 September 29; in original form 2017 July 12. DAA acknowledges support by a CIERA Postdoctoral Fellowship. CAFG was supported by NSF grants AST-1412836 and AST-1517491, NASA grant NNX15AB22G, STScI grant HST-AR-14562.001 and CXO grant TM7-18007X. EQ was supported by NASA ATP grant 12-ATP-120183, a Simons Investigator award from the Simons Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Support for PFH was provided by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NASA ATP Grant NNX14AH35G, and NSF grant AST-1411920 and CAREER award #1455342. RF acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 157591). PT acknowledges support from NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51384.001-A awarded by STScI. AW was supported by a Caltech-Carnegie Fellowship, the Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics at Caltech and NASA grant HST-GO-14734 from STScI. DK was supported by NSF Grant AST1412153 and a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The simulations were run using XSEDE, supported by NSF grant ACI-1053575, and Northwestern University's compute cluster 'Quest'.

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Submitted - 1707.03832

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August 19, 2023
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October 18, 2023