Star formation and accretion in the circumnuclear disks of active galaxies

¹ Institut für Astrophysik, Georg-August-Universität, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: sembi@astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de
² Astronomy Department, Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Received: 15 May 2013
Accepted: 13 September 2013

Abstract

Aims. We explore the evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBH) centered in a circumnuclear disk (CND) as a function of the mass supply from the host galaxy and considering different star formation laws, which may give rise to a self-regulation via the injection of supernova-driven turbulence.

Methods. A system of equations describing star formation, black hole accretion and angular momentum transport in the disk was solved self-consistently for an axisymmetric disk in which the gravitational potential includes contributions from the black hole, the disk and the hosting galaxy. Our model extends the framework provided by Kawakatu & Wada (2008, ApJ, 681, 73), by separately considering the inner and outer part of the disk, and by introducing a potentially non-linear dependence of the star formation rate on the gas surface density and the turbulent velocity. The star formation recipes are calibrated using observational data for NGC 1097, while the accretion model is based on turbulent viscosity as a source of angular momentum transport in a thin viscous accretion disk.

Results. We find that current data provide no strong constraint on the star formation recipe, and can in particular not distinguish between models entirely regulated by the surface density, and models including a dependence on the turbulent velocity. The evolution of the black hole mass, on the other hand, strongly depends on the applied star formation law, as well as the mass supply from the host galaxy. We suggest to explore the star formation process in local AGN with high-resolution ALMA observations to break the degeneracy between different star formation models.