Speaker
Description
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) drive powerful, multiphase outflows into their host galaxies which are expected to play a key role in galaxy evolution. However, exactly how small-scale accretion disc winds couple to the ISM to drive these outflows remains an open question. In this talk, I will present our AGN in Clumpy DisCs (ACDC) simulations which feature a physically-motivated AGN wind model embedded in an idealised galaxy disc with a resolved ISM, manually distributed in a clumpy substructure. We find that the hot wind causes the cold ISM clumps to fragment and become entrained in the outflow as small cloudlets. This leads to an outflow that differs significantly from commonly-considered shell-like morphologies, which has important implications for observational studies seeking to characterise outflows and infer their impact on the hot galaxy. We also find that mixing between the AGN wind and ISM clouds produces X-ray emission that can be detected above the level from star formation with telescopes such as Chandra or AXIS. This could provide a complementary probe for the total volume of gas that the outflow has interacted with.
