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A Dynamical Test for Cooling-Induced Entrainment in a Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Tail

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-04-16 v1

Abstract

Radiative turbulent mixing layers are widely invoked to explain the survival, growth, and entrainment of cold gas in hot astrophysical flows, but quantitative dynamical tests have remained scarce. RBH-1, the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, offers a rare opportunity to test this framework: JWST observations show a 62 kpc tail of cold Hα\alpha and [O III]-emitting gas behind a source moving at ~950 km/s through the hot circumgalactic medium, with a coherent velocity gradient of ~200 km/s along the tail. Using 3D hydrodynamical simulations together with turbulent mixing-layer theory, we model the coherent downstream tail. We find that the observed downstream deceleration is well reproduced by accretion-induced drag from radiative mixing layers, and that without radiative cooling no coherent cold tail forms. We also derive a direct connection between the tail deceleration and the cooling luminosity, yielding predictions for future measurements of the cooling luminosity profile. RBH-1 therefore provides a rare quantitative dynamical stress test of radiative mixing-layer physics in an astrophysical system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.13155,
  title  = {A Dynamical Test for Cooling-Induced Entrainment in a Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Tail},
  author = {Ish Kaul and S. Peng Oh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13155},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 Pages, 4 Figures. Comments welcome!