Cold Gas in Massive Galaxies as a Critical Test of Black Hole Feedback Models

Abstract Black hole feedback has been widely implemented as the key recipe to quench star formation in massive galaxies in modern semianalytic models and hydrodynamical simulations. As the theoretical details surrounding the accretion and feedback of black holes continue to be refined, various feedback models have been implemented across simulations, with notable differences in their outcomes. Yet, most of these simulations have successfully reproduced some observations, such as the stellar mass function and star formation rate density in the local universe. We use the recent observation of the change in the neutral hydrogen gas mass (including both H 2 and H I) with the star formation rate of massive central disk galaxies as a critical constraint of black hole feedback models across several simulations. We find that the predictions of IllustrisTNG agree with the observations much better than the other models tested in this work. This favors IllustrisTNG’s treatment of active galactic nuclei (AGN)—where kinetic winds are driven by black holes at low accretion rates—as more plausible among those we test. In turn, this also indirectly supports the idea that the massive central disk galaxy population in the local universe was likely quenched by AGN feedback.