385 research outputs found
Major Galaxy Mergers Only Trigger the Most Luminous AGN
Using multiwavelength surveys of active galactic nuclei across a wide range
of bolometric luminosities (10^{43}<L_{bol}(erg/s<5x10^{46}) and redshifts
(0<z<3), we find a strong, redshift-independent correlation between the AGN
luminosity and the fraction of host galaxies undergoing a major merger. That
is, only the most luminous AGN phases are connected to major mergers, while
less luminous AGN appear to be driven by secular processes. Combining this
trend with AGN luminosity functions to assess the overall cosmic growth of
black holes, we find that ~50% by mass is associated with major mergers, while
only 10% of AGN by number, the most luminous, are connected to these violent
events. Our results suggest that to reach the highest AGN luminosities -where
the most massive black holes accreted the bulk of their mass - a major merger
appears to be required. The luminosity dependence of the fraction of AGN
triggered by major mergers can successfully explain why the observed scatter in
the M-\sigma relation for elliptical galaxies is significantly lower than in
spirals. The lack of a significant redshift dependence of the
L_{bol}-f_{merger} relation suggests that downsizing, i.e., the general decline
in AGN and star formation activity with decreasing redshift, is driven by a
decline in the frequency of major mergers combined with a decrease in the
availability of gas at lower redshifts.Comment: Accepted for publication by Astrophysical Journal Letters, 6 pages in
emulateapj format, 3 figure
Major Galaxy Mergers and the Growth of Supermassive Black Holes in Quasars
Despite observed strong correlations between central supermassive black holes
(SMBHs) and star-formation in galactic nuclei, uncertainties exist in our
understanding of their coupling. We present observations of the ratio of
heavily-obscured to unobscured quasars as a function of cosmic epoch up to z~3,
and show that a simple physical model describing mergers of massive, gas-rich
galaxies matches these observations. In the context of this model, every
obscured and unobscured quasar represent two distinct phases that result from a
massive galaxy merger event. Much of the mass growth of the SMBH occurs during
the heavily-obscured phase. These observations provide additional evidence for
a causal link between gas-rich galaxy mergers, accretion onto the nuclear SMBH
and coeval star formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Science. Published by Science Express on
March 25th. 17 pages, 5 figures, including supplemental online materia
Obscured GOODS AGN and Their Host Galaxies at z < 1.25: The Slow Black Hole Growth Phase
We compute black hole masses and bolometric luminosities for 87 obscured AGN
in the redshift range 0.25 < z < 1.25, selected from the GOODS deep
multi-wavelength survey fields via their X-ray emission. We fit the optical
images and obtain morphological parameters for the host galaxy, separating the
galaxy from its central point source, thereby obtaining a four-band optical SED
for each active nucleus. We calculate bolometric luminosities for these AGN by
reddening a normalized mean SED of GOODS broad-line AGN to match the observed
central point-source SED of each obscured AGN. This estimate of Lbol has a
smaller spread than simple bolometric corrections to the X-ray luminosity or
direct integration of the observed multi-wavelength SED, suggesting it is a
better measure. We estimate central black hole masses from the bulge
luminosities. The black hole masses span a wide range, 7 x 10^6 M_sun to 6 x
10^9 M_sun; the median black hole mass is 5 x 10^8 M_sun. The majority of these
AGN have L/L_Edd < 0.01, and we detect no significant evolution of the mean
Eddington ratio to z = 1.25. This implies that the bulk of black hole growth in
these obscured AGN must have occurred at z > 1 and that we are observing these
AGN in a slow- or no-growth state.Comment: Accepted to ApJ; 17 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables; Updated version has
1 corrected referenc
A massive, distant proto-cluster at z=2.47 caught in a phase of rapid formation?
Numerical simulations of cosmological structure formation show that the
Universe's most massive clusters, and the galaxies living in those clusters,
assemble rapidly at early times (2.5 < z < 4). While more than twenty
proto-clusters have been observed at z > 2 based on associations of 5-40
galaxies around rare sources, the observational evidence for rapid cluster
formation is weak. Here we report observations of an asymmetric, filamentary
structure at z = 2.47 containing seven starbursting, submillimeter-luminous
galaxies and five additional AGN within a comoving volume of 15000 Mpc.
As the expected lifetime of both the luminous AGN and starburst phase of a
galaxy is ~100 Myr, we conclude that these sources were likely triggered in
rapid succession by environmental factors, or, alternatively, the duration of
these cosmologically rare phenomena is much longer than prior direct
measurements suggest. The stellar mass already built up in the structure is
and we estimate that the cluster mass will exceed that
of the Coma supercluster at . The filamentary structure is in line
with hierarchical growth simulations which predict that the peak of cluster
activity occurs rapidly at z > 2.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted in ApJL (small revisions from
previous version
The fraction of AGN in major merger galaxies and its luminosity dependence
We use a phenomenological model which connects the galaxy and AGN populations
to investigate the process of AGN triggering through major galaxy mergers at
z~0. The model uses stellar mass functions as input and allows the prediction
of AGN luminosity functions based on assumed Eddington ratio distribution
functions (ERDFs). We show that the number of AGN hosted by merger galaxies
relative to the total number of AGN increases as a function of AGN luminosity.
This is due to more massive galaxies being more likely to undergo a merger and
does not require the assumption that mergers lead to higher Eddington ratios
than secular processes. Our qualitative analysis also shows that to match the
observations, the probability of a merger galaxy hosting an AGN and accreting
at a given Eddington value has to be increased by a factor ~10 relative to the
general AGN population. An additional significant increase of the fraction of
high Eddington ratio AGN among merger host galaxies leads to inconsistency with
the observed X-ray luminosity function. Physically our results imply that,
compared to the general galaxy population, the AGN fraction among merger
galaxies is ~10 times higher. On average, merger triggering does however not
lead to significantly higher Eddington ratios.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figues, accepted for publication in MNRA
Growing supermassive black holes in the late stages of galaxy mergers are heavily obscured
Mergers of galaxies are thought to cause significant gas inflows to the inner
parsecs, which can activate rapid accretion onto supermassive black holes
(SMBHs), giving rise to Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). During a significant
fraction of this process, SMBHs are predicted to be enshrouded by gas and dust.
Studying 52 galactic nuclei in infrared-selected local Luminous and
Ultra-luminous infrared galaxies in different merger stages in the hard X-ray
band, where radiation is less affected by absorption, we find that the amount
of material around SMBHs increases during the last phases of the merger. We
find that the fraction of Compton-thick (CT, ) AGN in late merger galaxies is higher
() than in local hard X-ray selected AGN
(), and that obscuration reaches its maximum when the
nuclei of the two merging galaxies are at a projected distance of
kiloparsecs (). We also
find that all AGN of our sample in late merger galaxies have , which implies that the obscuring material covers
of the X-ray source. These observations show that the material
is most effectively funnelled from the galactic scale to the inner tens of
parsecs during the late stages of galaxy mergers, and that the close
environment of SMBHs in advanced mergers is richer in gas and dust with respect
to that of SMBHs in isolated galaxies, and cannot be explained by the classical
AGN unification model in which the torus is responsible for the obscuration.Comment: Final version matching the article published in MNRAS - 30 pages, 16
figure
IC 751: a new changing-look AGN discovered by NuSTAR
We present the results of five NuSTAR observations of the type 2 active
galactic nucleus (AGN) in IC 751, three of which were performed simultaneously
with XMM-Newton or Swift/XRT. We find that the nuclear X-ray source underwent a
clear transition from a Compton-thick () to a Compton-thin () state on timescales of months, which makes
IC 751 the first changing-look AGN discovered by NuSTAR. Changes of the
line-of-sight column density at a level are also found on a
time-scale of hours ().
From the lack of spectral variability on timescales of ks we infer
that the varying absorber is located beyond the emission-weighted average
radius of the broad-line region, and could therefore be related either to the
external part of the broad-line region or a clumpy molecular torus. By adopting
a physical torus X-ray spectral model, we are able to disentangle the column
density of the non-varying absorber () from that of the varying clouds
[], and to constrain that of
the material responsible for the reprocessed X-ray radiation (). We find evidence of significant intrinsic X-ray
variability, with the flux varying by a factor of five on timescales of a few
months in the 2-10 and 10-50 keV band.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 11 pages, 6 figure
Rest-frame Optical Emission Lines in Far-Infrared Selected Galaxies at z<1.7 from the FMOS-COSMOS Survey
We have used FMOS on Subaru to obtain near-infrared spectroscopy of 123
far-infrared selected galaxies in COSMOS and obtain the key rest-frame optical
emission lines. This is the largest sample of infrared galaxies with
near-infrared spectroscopy at these redshifts. The far-infrared selection
results in a sample of galaxies that are massive systems that span a range of
metallicities in comparison with previous optically selected surveys, and thus
has a higher AGN fraction and better samples the AGN branch. We establish the
presence of AGN and starbursts in this sample of (U)LIRGs selected as
Herschel-PACS and Spitzer-MIPS detections in two redshift bins (z~0.7 and
z~1.5) and test the redshift dependence of diagnostics used to separate AGN
from star-formation dominated galaxies. In addition, we construct a low
redshift (z~0.1) comparison sample of infrared selected galaxies and find that
the evolution from z~1.5 to today is consistent with an evolving AGN selection
line and a range of ISM conditions and metallicities from the models of Kewley
et al. (2013b). We find that a large fraction of (U)LIRGs are BPT-selected AGN
using their new, redshift-dependent classification line. We compare the
position of known X-ray detected AGN (67 in total) with the BPT selection and
find that the new classification line accurately selects most of these objects
(> 70%). Furthermore, we identify 35 new (likely obscured) AGN not selected as
such by their X-ray emission. Our results have direct implications for AGN
selection at higher redshift with either current (MOSFIRE, KMOS) or future
(PFS, MOONS) spectroscopic efforts with near-infrared spectral coverage.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in The
Astrophysical Journal Letter
Inferring Compton-thick AGN candidates at z>2 with Chandra using the >8 keV restframe spectral curvature
To fully understand cosmic black hole growth we need to constrain the
population of heavily obscured active galactic nuclei (AGN) at the peak of
cosmic black hole growth (1-3). Sources with obscuring column densities
higher than atoms , called Compton-thick
(CT) AGN, can be identified by excess X-ray emission at 20-30 keV, called
the "Compton hump". We apply the recently developed Spectral Curvature (SC)
method to high-redshift AGN (2<z<5) detected with Chandra. This method
parametrizes the characteristic "Compton hump" feature cosmologically
redshifted into the X-ray band at observed energies <10 keV. We find good
agreement in CT AGN found using the SC method and bright sources fit using
their full spectrum with X-ray spectroscopy. In the Chandra deep field south,
we measure a CT fraction of (3/17) for sources with
observed luminosity erg . In the
Cosmological evolution survey (COSMOS), we find an observed CT fraction of
(40/272) or when corrected for
the survey sensitivity. When comparing to low redshift AGN with similar X-ray
luminosities, our results imply the CT AGN fraction is consistent with having
no redshift evolution. Finally, we provide SC equations that can be used to
find high-redshift CT AGN (z>1) for current (XMM-Newton) and future (eROSITA
and ATHENA) X-ray missions.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
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