Hopkins, Philip F., Hayward, Christopher C., Narayanan, Desika, and Hernquist, Lars. 2012. "The origins of active galactic nuclei obscuration: the 'torus' as a dynamical, unstable driver of accretion." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 420 (1):320-339. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.20035.x
Recent multiscale simulations have made it possible to follow gas inflows responsible for high-Eddington ratio accretion on to massive black holes (BHs) from galactic scales to the BH accretion disc. When sufficient gas is driven towards a BH, gravitational instabilities generically form lopsided, eccentric discs that propagate inwards from larger radii. The lopsided stellar disc exerts a strong torque on the gas, driving inflows that fuel the growth of the BH. Here, we investigate the possibility that the same disc, in its gas-rich phase,
