Modelling the Growth of Supermassive Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations

Understand

There is strong evidence that supermassive black holes reside in all galaxies that contain a stellar spheroid and their mass is tightly correlated with properties such as stellar bulge mass and velocity dispersion.

• There are also strong theoretical arguments that feedback from supermassive black holes plays an important role in shaping the high mass end of the galaxy mass function, hence to accurately model galaxies we also need to model the black holes.
• We present a comparison of two black hole growth models implemented within a large-scale, cosmological SPH simulation including star formation and feedback.
• One model is a modified Bondi-Hoyle prescription that grows black holes based on the smooth density of local gas, while the other is the recently proposed Accretion Disc Particle (ADP) method.