Nonlinear Dynamical Friction of a Circular-orbit Perturber in a Uniform Gaseous Medium

We use three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations to investigate nonlinear gravitational responses of gas to, and the resulting drag force on, a massive perturber moving on a circular orbit through a uniform gaseous medium. We assume that the background medium is non-rotating and adiabatic with index 5/3, and represent the perturber using a Plummer potential with softening radius a. This work extends our previous study where we showed that the drag force on a straight-line trajectory is proportional to a0.45 if the perturber is massive enough. This indicates that the orbital decay of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) near galaxy centers may take much longer than the prediction of the linear force formula applicable for low-mass perturbers. For the circular orbits are considered, however, we find that the nonlinear drag force becomes independent of a, but dependent instead on the orbital radius R as $\varpropto$ R0.5. This suggests not only that the choices of large values of a, for resolution issues, in recent numerical experiments for mergers of SMBH, are marginally acceptable, but also that the gaseous drag indeed provides an efficient mean for the orbtial decay of SMBHs.