AGN Flickering and Chaotic Accretion

Abstract

Observational arguments suggest that the growth phases of the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei have a characteristic timescale $\sim 10^5$ yr. We show that this is the timescale expected in the chaotic accretion picture of black hole feeding, because of the effect of self-gravity in limiting the mass of any accretion disc feeding event.

3 pages. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters

References in corpus (4)

• The Evolution of Black Hole Mass and Spin in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Fuelling Active Galactic Nuclei
• An ultra-luminous quasar at z=5.363 with a ten billion solar mass black hole and a Metal-Rich DLA at z~5
• Active galactic nuclei flicker: an observational estimate of the duration of black hole growth phases of ~1e5 years

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