Cosmological Mestel Disks and the Rossby Vortex Instability: The Origin of Supermassive Black Holes

Abstract

A scenario is put forth for the formation of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. It depends upon the formation of a Mestel disk with a flat rotation curve, where the mass is proportional to r and thickness to 1/r. Such disks should form from the collapse of uniformly rotating, isolated, gaseous clouds, either proto-galactic, galaxy-mass damped Lyman alpha clouds or the gas that survives galaxy mergers. We propose that in any case the disk will be unstable to the Rossby vortex instability (RVI). This instability grows from any large, steep pressure gradient in an optically thick disk. Such pressure gradients either occur adjacent to compact objects or could be triggered by individual supernovae in and around the disk. Upon excitation, the RVI transports angular momentum far more efficiently than the turbulence of a viscosity-based Shakura-Sunyaev disk. The critical column density condition in a L* Mestel disk predicts that the black hole mass is ~ 10^8 Msolar and is also proportional to the 1/4 power of the velocity dispersion, in accordance with observations.

arXiv comment10 pages, to be published in ApJ Letters Nov. 2003

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• Quenching as a Contest between Galaxy Halos and their Central Black Holes
• The Growth of the Stellar Seeds of Supermassive Black Holes
• A Magnetic Alpha-Omega Dynamo in Active Galactic Nuclei Disks: II. Magnetic Field Generation, Theories and Simulations
• Direct collapse of exceptionally heavy black holes in the merger-driven scenario
• Coevolution Between Supermassive Black Holes and Bulges Is Not Via Internal Feedback Regulation But By Rationed Gas Supply Due To Angular Momentum Distribution
• Motivation and challenge to capture both large scale and local transport in next generation accretion theory
• A Magnetic Alpha-Omega Dynamo in Active Galactic Nuclei Disks: I. The Hydrodynamics of Star-Disk Collisions and Keplerian Flow
• Cosmic Ray Acceleration by E-Parallel Reconnection of Force-Free Fields
• Cosmological magnetic braking and the formation of high-redshift, super-massive black holes
• The galactic spin of AGN galaxies