Huffing and Puffing and Blowing Your House In: Strong Stellar Wind Interaction with a Supermassive Black Hole

Abstract

We present analytical and numerical models of a cluster wind flow resulting from the interaction of stellar winds of massive stars with a supermassive black hole (SMBH). We consider the motion of the stars as well as the gravitational force of the SMBH. In the numerical simulations we consider two cases: the first one with the stars in circular orbits around the SMBH, and the second one with the stars in eccentric orbits. We found that after the system reaches an equilibrium, the circular and elliptical cases are very similar. We found a very good agreement between the analytical and numerical results, not only from our numerical simulations but also from other high-resolution numerical calculations. The analytical models are very interesting, since the properties of such complex systems involving strong winds and a massive compact object can be rapidly inferred without the need of a numerical calculation.