English

AGN Flickering and Chaotic Accretion

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-08-26 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

Observational arguments suggest that the growth phases of the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei have a characteristic timescale 105\sim 10^5 yr. We show that this is the timescale expected in the chaotic accretion picture of black hole feeding, because of the effect of self-gravity in limiting the mass of any accretion disc feeding event.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.05960,
  title  = {AGN Flickering and Chaotic Accretion},
  author = {Andrew King and Chris Nixon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.05960},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

3 pages. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:15:54.356Z