Gravitational drag on a point mass in hypersonic motion through a gaseous medium

Abstract

We explore a ballistic orbit model to infer the gravitational drag force on an accreting point mass M, such as a black hole, moving at a hypersonic velocity v_{0} through a gaseous environment of density ρ_{0}. The streamlines blend in the flow past the body and transfer momentum to it. The total drag force acting on the body, including the nonlinear contribution of those streamlines with small impact parameter that bend significantly and pass through a shock, can be calculated by imposing conservation of momentum. In this fully analytic approach, the ambiguity in the definition of the lower cut-off distance $r_{\min }$ in calculations of the effect of dynamical friction is removed. It turns out that $r_{\min }=\sqrt{e}GM/2v_0^2$. Using spherical surfaces of control of different sizes, we carry out a successful comparison between the predicted drag force and the one obtained from a high resolution, axisymmetric, isothermal flow simulation. We demonstrate that ballistic models are reasonably successful in accounting for both the accretion rate and the gravitational drag.

8 pages, 6 figures, accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (7)

• Dynamical Friction of a Circular-Orbit Perturber in a Gaseous Medium
• `Tail-end' Bondi-Hoyle accretion in young star clusters: Implications for disks, planets, and stars
• Thermal Balance in the Intracluster Medium: Is AGN Feedback Necessary?
• Heating and Turbulence Driving by Galaxy Motions in Galaxy Clusters
• External Mass Accumulation onto Core Potentials: Implications for Star Clusters, Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters
• Nonlinear Dynamical Friction of a Circular-Orbit Perturber in a Gaseous Medium
• Gaseous drag on a gravitational perturber in Modified Newtonian Dynamics and the structure of the wake

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Dynamical friction on hot bodies in opaque, gaseous media
• Dynamical friction for supersonic motion in a homogeneous gaseous medium
• Dynamical friction with radiative feedback -- II. High resolution study of the subsonic regime
• Gravitational-wave Emission from a Primordial Black Hole Inspiraling inside a Compact Star: a Novel Probe for Dense Matter Equation of State
• Dynamical Friction in a Gas: The Supersonic Case
• The gravitational drag force on an extended object moving in a gas
• Binaries traveling through a gaseous medium: Dynamical drag forces and internal torques
• Gravitational drag on a point mass in hypersonic motion within a Gaussian disk
• Dynamical friction in a gaseous medium with a large-scale magnetic field
• Torques on low-mass bodies in retrograde orbit in gaseous disks
• Explosive ejections generated by gravitational interactions