Abstract
Spinning supermassive black holes (BHs) in active galactic nuclei magnetically launch relativistic collimated outflows, or jets. Without angular momentum supply, such jets are thought to perish within 3 orders of magnitude in distance from the BH, well before reaching kiloparsec scales. We study the survival of such jets at the largest scale separation to date, via 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of rapidly spinning BHs immersed into uniform zero-angular-momentum gas threaded by a weak vertical magnetic field. We place the gas outside the BH sphere of influence, or the Bondi radius, chosen to be much larger than the BH gravitational radius, R B = 103 R g. The BH develops dynamically important large-scale magnetic fields, forms a magnetically arrested disk (MAD), and launches relativistic jets that propagate well outside R B and suppress BH accretion to 1.5% of the Bondi rate, M ̇ B . Thus, low-angular-momentum accretion in the MAD state can form large-scale jets in Fanaroff-Riley (FR) type I and II galaxies. Subsequently, the disk shrinks and exits the MAD state: barely a disk (BAD), it rapidly precesses, whips the jets around, globally destroys them, and lets 5%-10% of M ̇ B reach the BH. Thereafter, the disk starts rocking back and forth by angles 90°-180°: the rocking accretion disk (RAD) launches weak intermittent jets that spread their energy over a large area and suppress BH accretion to ≲2% M ̇ B . Because the BAD and RAD states tangle up the jets and destroy them well inside R B, they are promising candidates for the more abundant, but less luminous, class of FR0 galaxies.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 79 |
| Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
| Volume | 964 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2024 |
Funding
A.L. wants to thank Nicholas Kaaz, Danat Issa, and Amy Secunda for their fruitful ideas and discussions for this work. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for the helpful comments and suggestions that have helped to improve the manuscript. O.G. is supported by the Flatiron Research and CIERA Fellowships. O.B. was supported by ISF grants 1657/18 and 2067/22, a BSF grant 2018312, and an NSF-BSF grant 2020747 (O.B. and A.T.). J.J. and A.T. acknowledge support from the NSF AST-2009884 and NASA 80NSSC21K1746 grants. H.Z. was supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. A.T. was supported by NSF grants AST-2107839, AST-1815304, AST-1911080, AST-2206471, and OAC-2031997. Support for this work was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through Chandra Award Number TM1-22005X issued by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Administration under contract NAS8-03060. The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC and visualization resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper via the LRAC allocation AST20011 ( http://www.tacc.utexas.edu ). This research used resources from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. An award of computer time was provided by the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC), Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), and the OLCF Director’s Discretionary Allocation programs under award PHY129. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award ALCC-ERCAP0022634. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC ERCAP award m2401 for 2022 and 2023.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science