Accretion, growth of supermassive black holes, and feedback in galaxy mergers

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 424; no. 2; pp. 1461 - 1470
• Main Author: Li, Li-Xin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Science Ltd 01-08-2012; Blackwell Publishing Ltd; Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Accretion disks; accretion, accretion discs; Astronomy; black hole physics; Black holes; cosmology: miscellaneous; galaxies: active; Quasars; quasars: general; Stars & galaxies; cosmology: miscellaneous; quasars: general; black hole physics; galaxies: active; accretion, accretion discs
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.21336.x

Abstract
Super-Eddington accretion is very efficient in growing the mass of a black hole: in a fraction of the Eddington time its mass can grow to an arbitrary large value if the feedback effect is not taken into account. However, since super-Eddington accretion has a very low radiation efficiency, people have argued against it as a major process for the growth of the black holes in quasars since observations have constrained the average accretion efficiency of the black holes in quasars to be ≳0.1. In this paper, we show that the observational constraint does not need to be violated if the black holes in quasars have undergone a two-phase growing process: with a short super-Eddington accretion process they get their masses inflated by a very large factor until the feedback process becomes important, then with a prolonged sub-Eddington accretion process they have their masses increased by a factor of ≳ 2. The overall average efficiency of this two-phase process is then ≳ 0.1, and the existence of black holes of masses ∼109 M⊙ by redshift 6 is easily explained. An observational test of the existence of the super-Eddington accretion phase is briefly discussed.