Accretion and Outflow in Active Galaxies

Abstract

Abstract. I review accretion and outflow in active galactic nuclei. Accreti4on appears to occur in a series of very small-scale, chaotic events, whose gas flows have no correlation with the largescale structure of the galaxy or with each other. The accreting gas has extremely low specific angular momentum and probably represents only a small fraction of the gas involved in a galaxy merger, which may be the underlying driver.Eddington accretion episodes in AGN must be common in order for the supermassive black holes to grow. I show that they produce winds with velocities v ∼ 0.1c and ionization parameters implying the presence of resonance lines of helium-like and hydrogen-like iron. The wind creates a strong cooling shock as it interacts with the interstellar medium of the host galaxy, and this cooling region may be observable in an inverse Compton continuum and lower-excitation emission lines associated with lower velocities. The shell of matter swept up by the shocked wind stalls unless the black hole mass has reached the value M σ implied by the M -σ relation. Once this mass is reached, further black hole growth is prevented. If the shocked gas did not cool as asserted above, the resulting ("energy-driven") outflow would imply a far smaller SMBH mass than actually observed. Minor accretion events with small gas fractions can produce galaxy-wide outflows, including fossil outflows in galaxies where there is little current AGN activity.

The XMM deep survey in the CDF-S

“…At this stage, one might consider whether the outflow mechanical energy is sufficient to influence the stellar processes in the host galaxy, following the reasoning of King (2010a) and Pounds (2014). Assuming an outflow velocity of 0.14c, we obtain a mechanical energy rateĖ mech = (1/2)Ṁ out v 2 out ≈ 9.5 × 10 44 erg s −1 (uncertain by at least one order of magnitude), which is only 1.5% of the Eddington luminosity of PID352 (∼6.5 × 10 46 erg s −1 ).…”