Gaseous Dynamical Friction: a Numerical Study of Extended Perturbers
arXiv:2103.15848 · doi:10.1093/mnras/staf1016
Abstract
The process of momentum and energy transfer between a massive body and a background medium it is moving through is known as dynamical friction (DF). It is key to our understanding of many astrophysical systems. We present a series of high-resolution simulations of gaseous DF using Lagrangian meshless finite mass hydrodynamics solver, the moving-mesh MUSCL scheme, and the piecewise parabolic method (PPM) solver. We use a set of simulations of massive bodies, modelled as Plummer spheres, moving with Mach . We investigate at which radial distances from the perturber these solvers recover the linear point mass solution for gaseous DF. We analyse the drag force and the structure and time evolution of the wake. The different solvers agree closely. Numerical convergence is reached when the initial spatial resolution is , where is the softening scale of the Plummer sphere. We find that the wake structure and drag force are recovered, at the level, when compared beyond . Our results predict that models using the standard linear point mass DF solution will overestimate the drag force on extended perturbers by as much as 25\%, for Mach1. Finally, we consider DF in the context of galaxy clusters, where dark matter subhaloes move through circumgalactic media. We show that DF is typically in the linear regime for most subhaloes in hosting haloes M but non-linear in more massive host haloes.
14 pages, 12 figures, accepted by MNRAS
References in corpus (13)
- The erratic dynamical life of black hole seeds in high-redshift galaxies
- Dynamical Friction of a Circular-Orbit Perturber in a Gaseous Medium
- Black hole mergers from dwarf to massive galaxies with the NewHorizon and Horizon-AGN simulations
- Adding Environmental Gas Physics to the Semi-Analytic Method for Galaxy Formation: Gravitational Heating
- Dynamical Friction Modeling of Massive Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations and Effects on Merger Rate Predictions
- Dynamical friction of massive objects in galactic centres
- Dark-matter-deficient dwarf galaxies form via tidal stripping of dark matter in interactions with massive companions
- Gas dynamical friction as a binary formation mechanism in AGN discs
- DISCO: A 3D Moving-Mesh Magnetohydrodynamics Code Designed for the Study of Astrophysical Disks
- Gaseous dynamical friction under radiative feedback: do intermediate-mass black holes speed up or down?
- Dynamical friction-driven orbital circularisation in rotating discs: a semi-analytical description
- Analytic solution to the dynamical friction acting on circularly moving perturbers
- WVTICs -- SPH initial conditions for everyone