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Abstract The coevolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies remains one of the central open questions in cosmology, rooted in the coupling between accretion, feedback, and the multiscale physics that links the event horizon to the circumgalactic medium. Here we bridge these scales by embedding a first-principles, GRMHD-informed prescription for black hole accretion and feedback—derived from multizone simulations that self-consistently connect inflows and outflows from the horizon to the Bondi radius—within cosmological magnetohydrodynamic zoom-in simulations of ∼1014M⊙halos. These GRMHD results predict a “suppressed Bondi” regime in which magnetic stresses and relativistic winds strongly reduce effective accretion rates in a spin-dependent manner. We find that black holes cannot grow efficiently by accretion until they exceed ∼107M⊙, regardless of the feedback strength. Beyond this threshold, systems bifurcate: low-spin (η ∼ 0.02) black holes continue to accrete without quenching star formation, while high-spin (η ≳ 0.3) black holes quench effectively but become starved of further growth. Early, massive seeding partially alleviates this tension through merger-driven assembly, yet an additional cold or super-Eddington accretion mode appears essential to reproduce the observed SMBH population and the empirical black hole–galaxy scaling relations. Our results demonstrate that GRMHD-informed feedback models can account for the maintenance-mode behavior of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei like M87*, but cannot by themselves explain the full buildup of SMBH mass across cosmic time. A unified, multiregime framework is required to capture the evolving interplay between spin-dependent feedback, cold inflows, and mergers in driving coevolution.
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This content will become publicly available on March 23, 2027
Bridging Scales: Modeling Suppressed Bondi Accretion on Black Holes and Its Impact on Galaxy Growth
Abstract The accretion and feedback processes governing supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth span an enormous range of spatial scales, from the Event Horizon to the circumgalactic medium. Recent general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations demonstrate that strong magnetic fields can substantially suppress gas accretion onto black holes. These simulations show that magnetic fields create magnetically arrested disk states, reducing inflow rates by up to 2 orders of magnitude relative to classical predictions. We incorporate this magnetic suppression prescription from recent GRMHD studies into DarkSage, a semianalytic model that tracks SMBH and galaxy coevolution over cosmic time. Implementing the suppression across different accretion rate regimes, we explore its impact on the distribution of black hole masses, stellar masses in galaxies, and active galactic nucleus (AGN) luminosities. We find that restricting suppression to sub-Eddington accretors (fEdd < 3 × 10−3) and rescaling AGN feedback efficiencies gives simultaneous agreement with the observed local distributions of both galaxy and black hole masses. At early cosmic times (z > 6), super-Eddington growth episodes dominate in our model, reproducing the high number densities of luminous AGN recently discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope. Our results highlight the critical sensitivity of galaxy assembly to the coupling between small-scale accretion physics and large-scale feedback regulation. Magnetic suppression of hot gas accretion can reconcile low-redshift constraints while preserving the rapid black hole growth required at early cosmic epochs, thereby providing a physically motivated bridge between horizon-scale GRMHD simulations and cosmological galaxy-formation models.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2502826
- PAR ID:
- 10678481
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Astronomical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Volume:
- 1000
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0004-637X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 173
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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