From Black Hole to Galaxy: Neural Operator Framework for Accretion and Feedback Dynamics

Modeling how supermassive black holes co-evolve with their host galaxies is notoriously hard because the relevant physics spans nine orders of magnitude in scale—from milliparsecs to megaparsecs—making end-to-end first-principles simulation infeasible. To characterize the feedback from the small scales, existing methods employ a static subgrid scheme or one based on theoretical guesses, which usually struggle to capture the time variability and derive physically faithful results. Neural operators are a class of machine learning models that achieve significant speed-up in simulating complex dynamics. We introduce a neural-operator–based "subgrid black hole'' that learns the small-scale local dynamics and embeds it within the direct multi-level simulations. Trained on small-domain (general relativistic) magnetohydrodynamic data, the model predicts the unresolved dynamics needed to supply boundary conditions and fluxes at coarser levels across timesteps, enabling stable long-horizon rollouts without hand-crafted closures. Thanks to the great speedup in fine-scale evolution, our approach for the first time captures intrinsic variability in accretion-driven feedback, allowing dynamic coupling between the central black hole and galaxy-scale gas. This work reframes subgrid modeling in computational astrophysics with scale separation and provides a scalable path toward data-driven closures for a broad class of systems with central accretors.