Feeding the Monster: turbulence, self-gravity and overlapping inflows around supermassive black holes

by Juan Manuel Carmona-Loaiza (SISSA)

Friday 6 Feb 2015, 10:30 → 11:30 Europe/Stockholm

FB55

According to the black hole paradigm, active galactic nuclei (AGN) are powered by super massive black holes (SMBH) accreting mainly from the interstellar medium of their host galaxy. One of the biggest challenges when studying SMBH fueling is not on accounting for the source of the fuel, as a galaxy can comfortably supply the required mass budget (~10^{7-8} \msun), but on the actual delivery of such budget to the SMBH. While plausible and efficient mechanisms have been proposed to bring the gas from large scales (~ kpc) down to the nuclear regions of a galaxy (~ 100 pc), and from the smallest scales close to the vicinity of the black hole (~ 0.1 pc) down to its innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO; ~10^{-5} pc), the region in between is still difficult to bridge. In this talk I'll present a series of numerical experiments to better understand the gas dynamics at these scales. In particular, I'll discuss previous results (Carmona-Loaiza et al. 2014), which suggest that the overlap between two consecutive uncorrelated ~100 pc inflows leads to prompt mass ~1 pc inflows due to rapid cancellation of angular momentum.