Longevity and prevalence of gas-rich nuclear disks

Determine whether long-lived, gas-rich nuclear accretion disks are common in high-redshift galaxies and identify the conditions under which they can be sustained for the approximately 30 Myr required for disk-induced tidal-disruption growth.

Background

The illustrative growth histories assume that the compact stellar cluster and accretion disk persist for roughly 30 Myr while an intermediate-mass black hole grows toward 105 solar masses. The paper states that testing whether such environments can survive requires large-scale cosmological simulations resolving gas inflow, star formation, and black-hole accretion.

References

Whether such long-lived, gas-rich nuclear disks are common in high-redshift galaxies, and under what conditions they can be sustained, remain open questions that require dedicated large-scale cosmological simulations with sufficient resolution to follow the interplay between gas inflow, star formation, and BH accretion.

Second, the limited duration of our simulations raises the question of whether the seemingly steady dTDE rate measured over $\sim$0.3 Myr can be sustained over 30 Myr required to grow an IMBH to $\sim 105\,M_\odot$.

These processes are not included in the present work, yet they can profoundly modify the disk environment and the efficiency of dTDE-driven growth.