Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Our Galactic Center black hole offers us the closest view of the everyday life of a supermassive black hole and its immediate environment. Despite its proximity, its accretion flow is not well understood. One of the pressing issues is our seeming inability of simulations to reproduce submm variability properties of Sagittarius A*. This complicates the interpretation of observational data and limits the study of near horizon physics. In this talk we will discuss that a galactic center black hole can only be understood in the context of its environment. We will review the multiphase gas surrounding the Sagittarius A* black hole between a few and 10^6 gravitational radii (~ 1 pc) and compare this with setup of a typical accretion simulation. I will present the most realistic to date simulations of the Galactic Center and discuss their consequences for finding the true description of black hole accretion and variability of the hot accretion flows.