Driving gas shells with radiation pressure on dust in radiation-hydrodynamic simulations

Understand

We present radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of radiatively-driven gas shells launched by bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) in isolated dark matter haloes.

• Our goals are (1) to investigate the ability of AGN radiation pressure on dust to launch galactic outflows and (2) to constrain the efficiency of infrared (IR) multi-scattering in boosting outflow acceleration.
• Our simulations are performed with the radiation-hydrodynamic code RAMSES-RT and include both single- and multi-scattered radiation pressure from an AGN, radiative cooling and self-gravity.
• Since outflowing shells always eventually become transparent to the incident radiation field, outflows that sweep up all intervening gas are likely to remain gravitationally bound to their halo even at high AGN luminosities.