Toward Horizon-scale Accretion Onto Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies

Understand

We present high-resolution, three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the fueling of supermassive black holes in elliptical galaxies from a turbulent medium on galactic scales, taking M87* as a typical case.

• The simulations use a new GPU-accelerated version of the Athena++ AMR code, and span more than 6 orders of magnitude in radius, reaching scales similar to the black hole horizon.
• The key physical ingredients are radiative cooling and a phenomenological heating model.
• We find that the accretion flow takes the form of multiphase gas at radii less than about a kpc.