English

Bridging Scales in Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: Subgrid Prescription from First Principles

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-02-18 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Understanding how supermassive black holes (BHs) couple to their host galaxies across a vast spatial and temporal dynamic range remains a central challenge in galaxy evolution. Using the multizone framework -- designed to capture bidirectional inflow--outflow from the event horizon to the Bondi scale -- we present a suite of long-duration GRMHD simulations spanning BH spins a=0|a_\ast|=0--0.9 and Bondi radii RB/rg=4×102R_B/r_g=4\times10^2--2×1062\times10^6. From these simulations we derive spin-dependent subgrid prescriptions from first principles, applicable to hot accretion flows with low-Eddington ratios (fEdd103f_{\rm Edd}\lesssim10^{-3}), for adoption in cosmological simulations and semi-analytic models. We provide compact analytic fits for the time-averaged accretion rate M˙(RB,a)\dot M(R_B,a_\ast) and feedback power E˙fb(RB,a)\dot E_{\rm fb}(R_B,a_\ast) with respect to the Bondi rate M˙B\dot{M}_B, which are largely insensitive to the initial gas configuration and magnetic field strength. To capture intrinsic time-variability, we also quantify the full distributions of M˙\dot M and feedback efficiency η\eta, both well described by lognormal statistics, with widths that increase toward larger RBR_B. We further measure self-consistent spin evolution in the hot accretion mode, finding that the spin-up parameter varies as s(a)3.7as(a_\ast)\simeq -3.7\,a_\ast, which implies a very long spindown timescale ts12(103/fEdd)Gyrt_s\simeq 12(10^{-3}/f_{\rm Edd})\,{\rm Gyr}. Thus, BH spins are effectively frozen during phases of quiescent accretion. Compared to conventional small-domain GRMHD calculations, our simulations, which reach dynamical equilibrium across horizon-to-galaxy scales, yield systematically different long-term accretion, feedback, and spin properties, cautioning against direct extrapolation from small-scale GRMHD simulations when constructing galactic-scale subgrid models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.15560,
  title  = {Bridging Scales in Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: Subgrid Prescription from First Principles},
  author = {Hyerin Cho and Ben S. Prather and Ramesh Narayan and Kung-Yi Su and Angelo Ricarte and Priyamvada Natarajan and Antonio J. Porras-Valverde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15560},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 figures