Browsing by Author "Angles-Alcazar, Daniel"
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Item Black hole - galaxy correlations without self-regulation(American Astronomical Society, 2013) Angles-Alcazar, Daniel; Ozel, Feryal; Dave, RomeelRecent models of black hole growth in a cosmological context have forwarded a paradigm in which the growth is self-regulated by feedback from the black hole itself. Here we use cosmological zoom simulations of galaxy formation down to z =2 to show that such strong self-regulation is required in the popular spherical Bondi accretion model, but that a plausible alternative model in which black hole growth is limited by galaxy-scale torques does not require self-regulation. Instead, this torque-limited accretion model yields black holes and galaxies evolving on average along the observed scaling relations by relying only on a fixed, 5% mass retention rate onto the black hole from the radius at which the accretion flow is fed. Feedback from the black hole may (and likely does) occur, but does not need to couple to galaxy-scale gas in order to regulate black hole growth. We show that this result is insensitive to variations in the initial black hole mass, stellar feedback, or other implementation details. The torque-limited model allows for high accretion rates at very early epochs (unlike the Bondi case), which if viable can help explain the rapid early growth of black holes, while by z ∼ 2 it yields Eddington factors of ∼1%–10%. This model also yields a less direct correspondence between major merger events and rapid phases of black hole growth. Instead, growth is more closely tied to cosmological disk feeding, which may help explain observational studies showing that, at least at z >~ 1, active galaxies do not preferentially show merger signatures.Item Cosmological baryon transfer in the SIMBA simulations(Oxford University Press, 2019) Dave, Romeel; Borrow, Josh; Angles-Alcazar, DanielWe present a framework for characterizing the large-scale movement of baryons relative to dark matter in cosmological simulations, requiring only the initial conditions and final state of the simulation. This is performed using the spread metric that quantifies the distance in the final conditions between initially neighbouring particles, and by analysing the baryonic content of final haloes relative to that of the initial Lagrangian regions (LRs) defined by their dark matter component. Applying this framework to the SIMBA cosmological simulations, we show that 40 per cent (10 per cent) of cosmological baryons have moved >1h−1Mpc (3h−1Mpc) by z = 0, primarily due to entrainment of gas by jets powered by an active galactic nucleus, with baryons moving up to 12h−1Mpc away in extreme cases. Baryons decouple from the dynamics of the dark matter component due to hydrodynamic forces, radiative cooling, and feedback processes.