Accretion onto supermassive and intermediate-mass black holes in cosmological simulations

¹ Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
² Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
³ Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville FL 32611, USA
⁴ Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, 550 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA
⁵ Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Gießenbachstraße 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
⁶ Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02138, USA
⁷ Département de Physique, Université de Montréal, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada
⁸ Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str 1, D-85741 Garching, Germany

^⋆ Corresponding author: rweinberger@aip.de

Received: 18 February 2025
Accepted: 16 May 2025

Abstract

Accretion is the dominant contribution to the cosmic massive black hole (MBH) density in the Universe today. However, modelling accretion in cosmological simulations is challenging due to the dynamic range involved, as well as the theoretical uncertainties of the underlying mechanisms driving accretion from galactic to black hole horizon scales. We present a simple, flexible parametrisation for gas inflows onto MBHs aimed at managing this uncertainty in the context of large-volume cosmological simulations. This study has been carried out as part of the ‘Learning the Universe’ collaboration, with an aim to jointly infer the initial conditions and physical processes governing the evolution of the Universe, using a Bayesian forward-modelling approach. To allow for this forward-modelling approach, we updated the prescription for accretion with a two-parameter free-fall based inflow estimate that allows for a radius-dependent inflow rate and added a simple model for unresolved accretion disks. We used uniform resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and the IllustrisTNG framework to study the MBH population and its dependence on the introduced model parameters. Once the parameters of the accretion formula were chosen, aimed at achieving a zero black hole mass density (BHMD) at a roughly similar redshift, the differences caused by details in the accretion formula are moderate in the supermassive black hole (SMBH) regime, indicating that it is difficult to distinguish between accretion mechanisms based on luminous active galactic nuclei (AGNs) powered by SMBHs. Applying the same models to intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) at high redshifts, however, reveals significantly different accretion rates in high-redshift, moderate-luminosity AGNs, as well as different frequencies and mass distributions of IMBH mergers for the same black hole formation model. This difference in the early growth history will also likely lead to an accretion model-dependent SMBH population in low-mass black hole formation scenarios.