Growing Supermassive Black Holes Inside Cosmological Simulations

Using a hydrodynamic adaptive mesh refinement code, we simulate the growth and evolution of a typical disk galaxy hosting a supermassive black hole (SMBH) within a cosmological volume. The simulation covers a dynamical range of 10 million, which allows us to study the transport of matter and angular momentum from super-galactic scales down to the outer edge of the accretion disk around the SMBH. A dynamically interesting circumnuclear disk develops in the central few hundred parsecs of the simulated galaxy, through which gas is stochastically transported to the central black hole.