English

Misaligned external gas acquisition boosts central black hole activities

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-07-02 v1

Abstract

One important question in active galactic nucleus (AGN) is how gas is brought down to the galaxy center. Both internal secular evolution (torque induced by non-axisymmetric galactic structures such as bars) and external processes (e.g. mergers or interactions) are expected to redistribute the angular momentum (AM) and transport gas inward. However, it is still under debate whether these processes can significantly affect AGN activities. Here we for the first time report that AGN fraction increases with the difference of kinematic position angles (ΔPAPAgasPAstar\Delta PA\equiv|PA_{\mathrm{gas}}-PA_{\mathrm{star}}|) between ionized gas (PAgasPA_{\mathrm{gas}}) and stellar disks (PAstarPA_{\mathrm{star}}) in blue and green galaxies, meanwhile this fraction remains roughly constant for red galaxies. Also the high luminosity AGN fraction increases with ΔPA\Delta PA while the low luminosity AGN fraction is independent with ΔPA\Delta PA. These observational results support a scenario in which the interaction between accreted and pre-existing gas provides the AM loss mechanism, thereby the gas inflow fuels the central BH activities, and the AM loss efficiency is positively correlated with the ΔPA\Delta PA.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.00627,
  title  = {Misaligned external gas acquisition boosts central black hole activities},
  author = {Yuren Zhou and Yanmei Chen and Yong Shi and Guinevere Kauffmann and Junfeng Wang and Gaoxiang Jin and Lan Wang and Shuai Feng and Min Bao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.00627},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

12 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:41:21.217Z