Black Hole–Disk Interactions in Magnetically Arrested Active Galactic Nuclei: General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations Using a Time-dependent, Binary Metric

Abstract

Perturber objects interacting with supermassive black hole accretion disks are often invoked to explain observed quasiperiodic behavior in active galactic nuclei (AGN). We present global, 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of black holes on inclined orbits colliding with magnetically arrested thick AGN disks using a binary black hole spacetime with mass ratio 0.1. We do this by implementing an approximate time-dependent binary black hole metric into the GRMHD Athena++ code. The secondary enhances the unbound mass outflow rate 2–4 times above that provided by the disk in quasiperiodic outbursts, eventually merging into a more continuous outflow at larger distances. We present a simple analytic model that qualitatively agrees well with this result and can be used to extrapolate to unexplored regions of parameter space. We show self-consistently for the first time that spin–orbit coupling between the primary black hole spin and the binary orbital angular momentum causes the accretion disk and jet directions to precess significantly (by 60°–80°) on long timescales (e.g., ∼20 times the binary orbital period). Because this effect may be the only way for thick AGN disks to consistently precess, it could provide strong evidence of a secondary black hole companion if observed in such a system. Besides this new phenomenology, the time-average properties of the disk and accretion rates onto the primary are only marginally altered by the presence of the secondary, consistent with our estimate for a perturbed thick disk. This situation might drastically change in cooled thin disks.