Rayleigh-Taylor instability of ionization front around black holes

Abstract

We examine the role of ionizing radiation emitted from black holes (BHs) in suppressing the growth of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) across the ionization front (I-front) that forms when the gas fueling the BH is neutral. We use radiation-hydrodynamic simulations to show that the RTI is suppressed for non-accelerating fronts on all scales resolved in our simulations. A necessary condition for the stability of the I-front is that the radius of the Strömgren sphere is larger than the Bondi radius. When this condition is violated the I-front collapses producing an accretion luminosity burst. Transient growth of the RTI occurs only during the accretion burst when the effective acceleration in the frame of reference of the I-front increases significantly due to the rapid expansion of the Strömgren sphere.

9 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• The Dynamics of Radiation Pressure-Dominated HII Regions
• Accretion onto Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in Dense Protogalactic Clouds
• Three-Dimensional Dynamical Instabilities in Galactic Ionization Fronts
• Non-linear Evolution of Rayleigh-Taylor Instability in a Radiation Supported Atmosphere

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• Rapid Black Hole Growth under Anisotropic Radiation Feedback
• Gaseous Dynamical Friction in Presence of Black Hole Radiative Feedback
• Radiation hydrodynamics models of Active Galactic Nuclei: Beyond the central parsec
• Bulge-driven Fueling of Seed Black Holes
• Dusty Gas Accretion onto Massive Black Holes and Infrared Diagnosis of the Eddington Ratio
• Radiation-driven turbulent accretion onto massive black holes
• Rayleigh-Taylor Instability at Ionization Fronts: Perturbation Analysis
• The role of Compton heating in radiation-regulated accretion on to black holes
• Instability of Magnetized Ionization Fronts Surrounding H II Regions
• Biconical-dominated Accretion Flow onto Seed Black Holes in a Hyper-accretion Regime
• Accelerated growth of seed black holes by dust in the early universe