The mean star formation rate of X-ray selected active galaxies and its evolution from z~2.5: results from PEP-Herschel

By D. Rosario, P. Santini, D. Lutz, Lijing Shao, R. Maiolino, D. M. Alexander, B. Altieri, P. Andreani, H. Aussel, F. E. Bauer and 30 more. 2012

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study relationships between star-formation rate (SFR) and the accretion luminosity and nuclear obscuration of X-ray selected active galactic nuclei (AGNs) using a combination of deep far-infrared (FIR) and X-ray data in three key extragalactic survey fields (GOODS-South, GOODS-North and COSMOS), as part of the PACS Evolutionary Probe (PEP) program. The use of three fields with differing areas and depths enables us to explore trends between the global FIR luminosity of the AGN hosts and the luminosity of the active nucleus across 4.5 orders of magnitude in AGN luminosity (LAGN) and spanning redshifts from the Local Universe to z = 2.5. Using imaging from the Herschel/PACS instrument in 2−3 bands, we combine FIR detections and stacks of undetected objects to arrive at mean fluxes for subsamples in bins of redshift and X-ray luminosity. We constrain the importance of AGN-heated dust emission in the FIR and confirm that the majority of the FIR emission of AGNs is produced by cold dust heated by star-formation in their host galaxies. We uncover characteristic trends between the mean FIR luminosity (L60) and accretion luminosity of AGNs, which depend both on LAGN and redshift. At low AGN luminosities, accretion and SFR are uncorrelated at all redshifts, consistent with a scenario where most low-luminosity AGNs are primarily fueled by secular processes in their host galaxies. At high AGN luminosities, a significant correlation is observed between L60 and LAGN, but only among AGNs at low and moderate redshifts (z 1) suggesting that the role of mergers is less important at these epochs. At all redshifts, we find essentially no relationship between L60 and nuclear obscuration across five orders of magnitude in obscuring Hydrogen column density (NH), suggesting that various mechanisms are likely to be responsible for obscuring X-rays in active galaxies. We discuss a broad scenario which can account for these trends: one in which two different modes of AGN fueling operate in the low- and high-luminosity regimes of SMBH accretion. We postulate that the dominant mode of accretion among high-luminosity AGNs evolves with redshift. Our study, as well as a body of evidence from the literature and emerging knowledge about the properties of high redshift galaxies, supports this scenario.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/278dcaf11d898c5ab93f1be61efd5df8101038fb

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Citations in the corpus

Accreting supermassive black holes in the COSMOS field and the connection to their host galaxies (2012, methodology): “…low 13 The intrinsic AGN luminosity at 60 µm was estimated using the mean SED (normalized to the bolometric luminosity of the AGN) from Mullaney et al. (2011) and assuming a scatter around this value of 0.3 dex, which corresponds to the expected scatter in the SED shapes from Rosario et al. (2012).”
The Herschel* PEP/HerMES luminosity function - I. Probing the evolution of PACS selected Galaxies to z ≃ 4 (2013, result): “In agreement with other Herschel findings (i.e. Shao et al. 2010; Lapi et al. 2011; Santini et al. 2012; Rosario et al. 2012; Page et al. 2012; Mullaney et al. 2012), we propose the following twofold evolutionary scenario for galaxies and AGN (sketched in a cartoon in Fig.”
The Illustris simulation: the evolving population of black holes across cosmic time (2014, background): “For example, Mullaney et al. (2012) and Rosario et al. (2012) using a combination of far-infrared and X-ray data found no correlation between star formation rates and AGN X-ray luminosities, suggesting that they might be triggered by different physical processes.”
Cosmic X-ray surveys of distant active galaxies (2015, background): “Rosario et al 2012, 2013b; Rovilos et al 2012; Santini et al 2012).”
The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe (2014, background): “Rosario et al. (2012) find no correlation (at z ∼ 0) between the global (galaxy-wide) SFR and AGN luminosity for AGN bolometric luminosities below about 1044 erg/s, and SFR ∝ L0.”
A CORRELATION BETWEEN STAR FORMATION RATE AND AVERAGE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION IN STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2013, background): “…suggest that the evolutionary link between SMBHs and their host galaxies only exists in high luminosity AGNs that are possibly triggered by mergers, and there is little or no correlation at lower luminosities (e.g. Shao et al. 2010; Lutz et al. 2010; Rosario et al. 2012; Rovilos et al. 2012).”
Kiloparsec-scale outflows are prevalent among luminous AGN: outflows and feedback in the context of the overall AGN population (2014, background): “[7–120] M⊙ yr−1and are typical for AGN of these luminosities at these redshifts (e.g., Zakamska et al. 2008; Mullaney et al. 2010; Rosario et al. 2012).”
Tracing the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes to z ∼ 3 with Herschel (2014, background): “As expected, the distributions of flux ratio are quite broad (about 0.6 dex), so they do not imply a tight correlation between star-formation and AGN accretion activities (see e.g. Rosario et al. 2012).”
Constraining the properties of AGN host galaxies with spectral energy distribution modelling (2015, methodology): “…are typically massive and lie, at least in average sense, on the main sequence of star-formation (e.g., Mullaney et al. 2012; Santini et al. 2012; Rosario et al. 2012, 2013), we also choose the mock galaxies to sit on the main sequence of the SAM at redshift z = 1 and to have high stellar masses.”
BLACK HOLE VARIABILITY AND THE STAR FORMATION–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS CONNECTION: DO ALL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES HOST AN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS? (2013, background): “Overall, this simple model produces remarkable agreement with both the results on the average AGN luminosity of SF galaxies (Symeonidis et al. 2011; Rafferty et al. 2011; Chen et al. 2013) and the average SFR of AGNs (Lutz et al. 2010; Shao et al. 2010; Rosario et al. 2012).”
A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN. (2015, methodology): “A1, in comparison with the overall means of the K-M method results for each redshift range, as well as the results of Rosario et al. (2012).”
AGN wind scaling relations and the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies (2017, background): “Several authors published correlations between AGN luminosity and SFR, whose scatter is large, in particular at low AGN luminosities (e.g. Shao et al. 2010; Rosario et al. 2012; Mullaney et al. 2012; Hickox et al. 2014; Rodighiero et al. 2015).”
Revisiting the Unified Model of Active Galactic Nuclei (2015, background): “The host galaxies of most AGNs are SF galaxies (Rosario et al. 2012, 2013).”
EVIDENCE FOR WIDE-SPREAD ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS-DRIVEN OUTFLOWS IN THE MOST MASSIVE z ∼ 1–2 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2014, background): “Herschel studies have revealed that the AGN host population is mainly drawn from normal main-sequence SFGs (e.g., Mullaney et al. 2012; Rosario et al. 2012, 2013b).”
The evolution of the dust and gas content in galaxies (2013, methodology): “The stacking procedure adopted in this work is similar to that described by Santini et al. (2012b) and also used in Rosario et al. (2012) and Shao et al. (2010).”
The incidence of obscuration in active galactic nuclei (2013, background): “This is consistent with the results of large Herschel studies over similar redshifts which find no clear dependence of SFR on X-ray obscuration (Shao et al. 2010; Rosario et al. 2012).”