AURIGA zoom-in run shows AGN outflows in 10^9.7 M_sun dwarf heat central ISM episodically but recycle gas inside 10 kpc without halo escape

Elena Arjona-Gálvez and colleagues analysed a single high-resolution AURIGA zoom-in halo containing a 10^9.7 M_sun galaxy and 10^7 M_sun black hole. Outflow episodes were tagged at pressure peaks around the central BH; gas parcels were then tracked for temperature, velocity and radial position while synthetic emission-line maps were generated with photoionisation models to place the system on BPT diagrams. The simulation records compact, over-pressurised bubbles that accelerate ISM gas to 600 km/s—well above stellar-feedback speeds—yet the material stalls and falls back within 10 kpc. Over its duty cycle the galaxy crosses the star-forming sequence into the composite and AGN loci before returning to low-ionisation nuclear emission, illustrating episodic fuel starvation. Compared with earlier idealised dwarf-AGN runs and the observational samples of Reines et al. (2013) and Molina et al. (2021), the AURIGA case supplies the first self-consistent prediction of time-dependent line-ratio evolution that JWST IFU programmes can test at z greater than 2. Larger statistical samples and explicit cosmic-ray or magnetic-field variations will be required to assess how common the recycling-dominated regime is across the dwarf population.