The Fate of Supermassive Black Holes and the Evolution of the <i>M</i> <sub>BH</sub> -σ Relation in Merging Galaxies: The Effect of Gaseous Dissipation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyze the effect of dissipation on the orbital evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) using high-resolution gasdynamical simulations of binary equal- and unequal-mass mergers of disk galaxies. The initial conditions are consistent with the LCDM paradigm of structure formation and the simulations include the effects of radiative cooling and star formation. We find that equal-mass mergers always lead to the formation of a close SMBH pair at the center of the remnant with separations limited solely by the adopted force resolution of ~ 100 pc. Instead, the final separation of the SMBHs in unequal-mass mergers depends sensitively on how the central structure of the merging galaxies is modified by dissipation. In the absence of dissipation, the companion galaxy is entirely disrupted before the merger is completed leaving the satellite SMBH wandering at a distance too far from the center of the remnant for the formation of a close pair. In contrast, gas cooling facilitates the pairing process by increasing the resilience of the companion galaxy to tidal disruption. We demonstrate that galaxies constructed to obey the M(BH)-sigma relation, move relative to it depending on whether they undergo a dissipational or collisionless merger, regardless of the mass ratio of the merging systems. In dissipational mergers, the interplay between strong gas inflows associated with the formation of massive nuclear disks and the consumption of gas by star formation may provide the necessary fuel to the SMBHs and allow their host galaxies to satisfy the relation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".