The Many lives of AGN: Cooling flows, black holes and the luminosities and colours of galaxies

By Darren Croton, G. Kauffmann, Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White, G. Lucia, Adrian Jenkins, J. Navarro, Carlos S. Frenk, Liang Gao, Naoki Yoshida. 2006

1,382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We simulate the growth of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes by implementing a suite of semi-analytic models on the output of the Millennium Run, a very large simulation of the concordanceCDM cosmogony. Our procedures fol- low the detailed assembly history of each object and are able to track the evolution of all galaxies more massive than the Small Magellanic Cloud throughout a volume comparable to that of large modern redshift surveys. In this first paper we supple- ment previous treatments of the growth and activity of central black holes with a new model for 'radio' feedback from those AGN that lie at the centre of a quasistatic X-ray emitting atmosphere in a galaxy group or cluster. We show that for energetically and observationally plausible parameters such a model can simultaneously explain: (i) the low observed mass drop-out rate in cooling flows; (ii) the exponential cut-off at the bright end of the galaxy luminosity function; and (iii) the fact that the most massive galaxies tend to be bulge-dominated systems in clusters and to contain systematically older stars than lower mass galaxies. This success occurs because static hot atmo- spheres form only in the most massive structures, and radio feedback (in contrast, for example, to supernova or starburst feedback) can suppress further cooling and star formation without itself requiring star formation. We discuss possible physical mod- els which might explain the accretion rate scalings required for our phenomenological 'radio mode' model to be successful.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/235ec21ad4b282417780986bebd6039bd660fa22

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Citations in the corpus

UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AT REDSHIFTS z ∼ 4 TO z ∼ 10: 10,000 GALAXIES FROM HST LEGACY FIELDS (2014, background): “I. COMPARISONS AGAINST THE TOTAL MAGNITUDE MEASUREMENTS FROM MCLURE ET AL.”
The Luminosities, Sizes, and Velocity Dispersions of Brightest Cluster Galaxies: Implications for Formation History (2006, background): “The most recent galaxy formation models arrange for this to happen by a combination of two processes: dry mergers and AGN feedback (Hopkins et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2005; De Lucia et al. 2005; Robinson et al. 2006; Bower et al. 2006).”