Wandering Supermassive Black Holes in Milky Way Mass Halos

Abstract

We present a self-consistent prediction from a large-scale cosmological simulation for the population of `wandering' supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of mass greater than $10^6$ M${}_{\odot }$ on long-lived, kpc-scale orbits within Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies. We extract a sample of MW-mass halos from the Romulus25 cosmological simulation (Tremmel et al. 2017), which is uniquely able to capture the orbital evolution of SMBHs during and following galaxy mergers. We predict that such halos, regardless of recent merger history or morphology, host an average of $5.1\pm 3.3$ SMBHs, including their central black hole, within 10 kpc from the galactic center and an average of $12.2\pm 8.4$ SMBHs total within their virial radius, not counting those in satellite halos. Wandering SMBHs exist within their host galaxies for several Gyrs, often accreted by their host halo in the early Universe. We find, with $>4\sigma$ significance, that wandering SMBHs are preferentially found outside of galactic disks.

7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

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