Active galactic nucleus outflows accelerate when they escape the bulge

Abstract

Large-scale outflows driven by AGNs are an important element of galaxy evolution. Detailed analysis of their properties allows us to probe the activity history of the galactic nucleus and, potentially, other properties of the host galaxy. A recent paper presents detailed radial velocity profiles of outflows in ten AGN host galaxies and shows a common trend of approximately constant velocity in the centre followed by rapid acceleration outside $R_{\rm tr} \sim 1 - 3$ kpc. We show that this is a consequence of the AGN-driven outflows clearing the gaseous bulges of the host galaxies and beginning to expand into a region of negligible gas density. We used a 1D semi-analytical code to calculate outflow propagation in each of the ten galaxies, assuming a constant AGN luminosity and an isothermal bulge density profile, with a finite bulge radius, and leaving the gas fraction and total mass of the bulge as free parameters. We also considered the effect of different gas density profiles, variations in bulge velocity dispersion, AGN luminosity, and the effect of outflow fragmentation. Our simplest model can fit six outflow profiles essentially perfectly, while another can be fit if the bulge gas density profile is shallower than isothermal. A shallower density profile also improves the fit in the central regions of the remaining three outflows, but they accelerate faster than our models predict; this could be evidence of significant gas cooling and star formation that reduce the total mass of outflowing gas. We conclude that a simple AGN-driven wind feedback model can explain the detailed velocity profiles of real outflows in local AGN hosts. The free parameters of our model have values that fall well within reasonable ranges. This suggests that the simple scenario we envisioned is close to the true conditions governing the general trends of large-scale outflow expansion.