1,477 research outputs found
A population of intermediate-mass black holes in dwarf starburst galaxies up to redshift=1.5
We study a sample of 50,000 dwarf starburst and late-type galaxies
drawn from the COSMOS survey with the aim of investigating the presence of
nuclear accreting black holes (BHs) as those seed BHs from which supermassive
BHs could grow in the early Universe. We divide the sample into five complete
redshift bins up to and perform an X-ray stacking analysis using the
\textit{Chandra} COSMOS-Legacy survey data. After removing the contribution
from X-ray binaries and hot gas to the stacked X-ray emission, we still find an
X-ray excess in the five redshift bins that can be explained by nuclear
accreting BHs. This X-ray excess is more significant for . At higher
redshifts, these active galactic nuclei could suffer mild obscuration, as
indicated by the analysis of their hardness ratios. The average nuclear X-ray
luminosities in the soft band are in the range 10 erg s.
Assuming that the sources accrete at 1\% the Eddington rate, their BH
masses would be 10 M, thus in the intermediate-mass BH
regime, but their mass would be smaller than the one predicted by the
BH-stellar mass relation. If instead the sources follow the correlation between
BH mass and stellar mass, they would have sub-Eddington accreting rates of
10 and BH masses 1-9 10 M. We thus
conclude that a population of intermediate-mass BHs exists in dwarf starburst
galaxies, at least up to =1.5, though their detection beyond the local
Universe is challenging due to their low luminosity and mild obscuration unless
deep surveys are employed.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, ApJ in pres
The diffuse X-ray background
The deepest observations of the X-ray background approach the surface
brightness of the truly diffuse component generated by Thomson scattering of
cosmic X-ray photons. Available estimates of the electron density and the X-ray
luminosity density of AGNs as a function of cosmological epoch are used to
calculate the integral scattered X-ray background component. It is shown that
the scattered component constitutes 1.0 - 1.7 % of the total background,
depending on the AGN cosmic evolution. Albeit this is a minute fragment of the
total flux, it becomes a perceptible fraction of the still unresolved part of
the background and should be taken into account in the future rigorous
assessments of the X-ray background structure. This diffuse component at
energies < 1 keV sums up with the emission by WHIM to 3 - 4 %. Consequently,
one should expect that integrated counts of discrete sources account for just
96 - 97 % for soft background and ~99 % at higher energies.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, AA in prin
Distance to G14.33-0.64 in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm: H2O Maser Trigonometric Parallax with VERA
We report on trigonometric parallax measurements for the Galactic star
forming region G14.33-0.64 toward the Sagittarius spiral arm. We conducted
multi-epoch phase-referencing observations of an H2O maser source in
G14.33-0.64 with the Japanese VLBI array VERA. We successfully detected a
parallax of 0.893+/-0.101 mas, corresponding to a source distance of
1.12+/-0.13 kpc, which is less than half of the kinematic distance for
G14.33-0.64. Our new distance measurement demonstrates that the Sagittarius arm
lies at a closer distance of ~1 kpc, instead of previously assumed ~2-3 kpc
from kinematic distances. The previously suggested deviation of the Sagittarius
arm toward the Galactic center from the symmetrically fitted model (Taylor &
Cordes 1993) is likely due to large errors of kinematic distances at low
galactic longitudes. G14.33-0.64 most likely traces the near side of the
Sagittarius arm. We attempted fitting the pitch angle of the arm with other
parallax measurements along the arm, which yielded two possible pitch angles of
i=34.7+/-2.7 degrees and i=11.2+/-10.5 degrees. Our proper motion measurements
suggest G14.33-0.64 has no significant peculiar motion relative to the
differential rotation of the Galaxy (assumed to be in a circular orbit),
indicating that the source motion is in good agreement with the Galactic
rotation.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, to appear in PASJ Vol. 62, No.
Occupation of X-ray selected galaxy groups by X-ray AGN
We present the first direct measurement of the mean Halo Occupation
Distribution (HOD) of X-ray selected AGN in the COSMOS field at z < 1, based on
the association of 41 XMM and 17 C-COSMOS AGN with member galaxies of 189 X-ray
detected galaxy groups from XMM and Chandra data. We model the mean AGN
occupation in the halo mass range logM_200[Msun] = 13-14.5 with a rolling-off
power-law with the best fit index alpha = 0.06(-0.22;0.36) and normalization
parameter f_a = 0.05(0.04;0.06). We find the mean HOD of AGN among central
galaxies to be modelled by a softened step function at logMh > logMmin = 12.75
(12.10,12.95) Msun while for the satellite AGN HOD we find a preference for an
increasing AGN fraction with Mh suggesting that the average number of AGN in
satellite galaxies grows slower (alpha_s < 0.6) than the linear proportion
(alpha_s = 1) observed for the satellite HOD of samples of galaxies. We present
an estimate of the projected auto correlation function (ACF) of galaxy groups
over the range of r_p = 0.1-40 Mpc/h at = 0.5. We use the large-scale
clustering signal to verify the agreement between the group bias estimated by
using the observed galaxy groups ACF and the value derived from the group mass
estimates. We perform a measurement of the projected AGN-galaxy group
cross-correlation function, excluding from the analysis AGN that are within
galaxy groups and we model the 2-halo term of the clustering signal with the
mean AGN HOD based on our results.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa
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