AGN Host Galaxies at z ~ 0.4-1.3: Bulge-dominated and Lacking Merger-AGN Connection

By Norman Grogin, Christopher J. Conselice, E. Chatzichristou, D. M. Alexander, F. E. Bauer, A. Hornschemeier, S. Jogee, A. Koekemoer, V. Laidler, M. Livio and 6 more. 2005

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate morphological structure parameters and local environments of distant moderate-luminosity active galactic nucleus (AGN) host galaxies in the overlap between the HST/ACS observations of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) and the two Chandra Deep Fields. We compute near-neighbor counts and BViz asymmetry (A) and concentration (C) indices for ≈35,500 GOODS/ACS galaxies complete to z850 ≈ 26.6, including the resolved hosts of 322 X-ray-selected AGNs. Distributions of (1) z850 asymmetry for 130 z850 < 23 AGN hosts and (2) near-neighbor counts for 173 z850 < 24 AGN hosts are both consistent with non-AGN control samples. This implies no close connection between recent galaxy mergers and moderate-luminosity AGN activity out to appreciable look-back times (z ≲ 1.3), approaching the epoch of peak AGN activity in the universe. The distribution of z850 C for the AGN hosts is offset by ΔC ≈ +0.5 compared to the non-AGN, a 6.4 σ discrepancy much larger than can be explained by the possible influence of unresolved emission from the AGN or a circumnuclear starburst. The local universe association between AGN and bulge-dominated galaxies thus persists to substantial look-back time. We discuss implications in the context of the low-redshift supermassive central black hole mass correlation with host galaxy properties, including concentration.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34ef03eca85dbd77fd86274201503cc010112050

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmic X-ray surveys of distant active galaxies (2015, background): “…X-ray AGNs are found to reside in a broad range of host-galaxy types out to at least z ≈ 3, from disk-dominated to bulge-dominated systems (e.g., Grogin et al 2005; Pierce et al 2007, 2010b; Gabor et al 2009; Georgakakis et al 2009; Cisternas et al 2011, 2014; Kocevski et al 2012; Böhm et al…”
THE BULK OF THE BLACK HOLE GROWTH SINCE z ∼ 1 OCCURS IN A SECULAR UNIVERSE: NO MAJOR MERGER–AGN CONNECTION (2010, methodology): “Our results agree with the few recent studies that have used a control sample (Dunlop et al. 2003; Grogin et al. 2003, 2005; Pierce et al. 2007; Gabor et al. 2009; Reichard et al. 2009; Tal et al. 2009, and also with recent results from the E-CDFS by Böhm et al. 2010, submitted), in the sense that…”
The Physical Nature of Rest-UV Galaxy Morphology during the Peak Epoch of Galaxy Formation (2006, unknown): “1.3) by Pierce et al. (2006) and Grogin et al. (2005) also found the rest-frame optical morphologies of X-ray luminous AGN to be more compact than those of IR-selected AGN or ordinary field galaxies.”
ONGOING AND CO-EVOLVING STAR FORMATION IN zCOSMOS GALAXIES HOSTING ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2008, methodology): “Xray observations with both Chandra and XMM-Newton are being exploited to cleanly study the host galaxies of X-ray selected AGN (Grogin et al. 2005; Nandra et al. 2007; Pierce et al. 2007; Gabor et al. 2008).”
Morphologies of z ∼ 0.7 AGN host galaxies in CANDELS: no trend of merger incidence with AGN luminosity (2014, methodology): “A number of studies have found no statistically significant differences (Dunlop et al. 2003; Grogin et al. 2005; Cisternas et al. 2011; Boehm et al. 2013).”
Early and Rapid Merging as a Formation Mechanism of Massive Galaxies: Empirical Constraints (2005, background): “Thus it seems likely that the build up of black holes and galaxy bulges, which is already present in some form at z ∼ 1 (Grogin et al. 2005) could be driven by the major merger process.”
GOODS-Herschel: the far-infrared view of star formation in active galactic nucleus host galaxies since z ≈ 3 (2011, background): “…evidence to suggest that more moderatelevels of nuclear activity (i.e., sub-quasar;LX. 1044 ergs s−1) are typically associated with internally-evolving galaxies undergoing secular evolution rather than major-mergers (e.g., Grogin et al. 2005; Schawinski et al. 2011; Cisternas et al. 2011).”
CANDELS: CONSTRAINING THE AGN–MERGER CONNECTION WITH HOST MORPHOLOGIES AT z ∼ 2 (2011, methodology): “These findings suggest that the trend observed at lower redshifts, that AGN hosts are more spheroid-dominated relative to similarly massive nonactive galaxies (e.g., Grogin et al. 2005; Pierce et al. 2007), continues to some extent out to z ∼ 2.”
COLOR–MAGNITUDE RELATIONS OF ACTIVE AND NON-ACTIVE GALAXIES IN THE CHANDRA DEEP FIELDS: HIGH-REDSHIFT CONSTRAINTS AND STELLAR-MASS SELECTION EFFECTS (2010, background): “(4) Morphologies of X-ray selected moderateluminosity AGNs reveal no close connection between major mergers and AGN activity, and are consistent with minor interactions and/or secular evolution (e.g., Grogin et al. 2005; Georgakakis et al. 2008; Silverman et al. 2008b).”
ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS HOST GALAXY MORPHOLOGIES IN COSMOS (2009, methodology): “This result, which conflicts with some previous findings (Grogin et al. 2005; Pierce et al. 2007), deserves a fair amount of scrutiny.”
The structures of distant galaxies – I. Galaxy structures and the merger rate to z∼ 3 in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2007, methodology): “As described in the introduction, the structures and morphologies of galaxies is quickly becoming recognised as one of the most important methods for understanding galaxies (e.g., Conselice 2003a,b; Cassata et al. 2005; Grogin et al. 2005; Trujillo et al. 2007).”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “The host galaxy morphologies of X-ray detected AGNs are also comparable to those of similarly massive inactive galaxies (e.g., Sánchez et al., 2004; Grogin et al., 2005; Pierce et al., 2007; Gabor et al., 2009; Georgakakis et al., 2009; Kocevski et al., 2011; Schawinski et al., 2011), with a mix…”
The mean star formation rate of X-ray selected active galaxies and its evolution from z~2.5: results from PEP-Herschel (2012, background): “Studies of moderate luminosity X-rayAGNs find no excess of merger signatures compared to inactive galaxies (e.g. Grogin et al. 2005), and only weak trends with AGN luminosity (Cisternas et al. 2011; Kocevski et al. 2012).”
The fundamental properties of galaxies and a new galaxy classification system (2006, methodology): “…been successfully used to classify both nearby (Conselice et al. 2002; Conselice 2003) and high redshift galaxy populations (Conselice et al. 2003b; Conselice et al. 2004; Grogin et al. 2005; Papovich et al. 2005; Lehmer et al. 2005; Conselice et al. 2005c; Lotz et al. 2006) within the CAS system.”
BLACK HOLE GROWTH AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI OBSCURATION BY INSTABILITY-DRIVEN INFLOWS IN HIGH-REDSHIFT DISK GALAXIES FED BY COLD STREAMS (2011, background): “Host galaxies of moderate-luminosity AGNs do not show an excess of majormerger signatures (Grogin et al. 2005; Gabor et al. 2009) and often have disky morphologies (Schawinski et al. 2011).”
CANDELS: THE COSMIC ASSEMBLY NEAR-INFRARED DEEP EXTRAGALACTIC LEGACY SURVEY (2011, unknown): “Hubble imaging has not thus far shown much evidence for excess merger signatures in X-ray sources at z ≈ 1 (Grogin et al. 2005; Pierce et al. 2007), but triggering processes in brighter QSOs, which are more common at z ≈ 2, may differ.”
The Evolution of Galaxy Structure Over Cosmic Time (2014, background): “However, studies at higher redshifts generally do not find that more asymmetric or merging galaxies have a higher AGN fraction (e.g., Grogin et al. 2005; Gabor et al. 2009; Kocevski et al. 2012).”
MAJOR GALAXY MERGERS ONLY TRIGGER THE MOST LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2012, methodology): “Morphologies of AGN host galaxies have been estimated before using automatic classifications (e.g., Grogin et al. 2005), and 2-dimensional surface brightness fitting (Sánchez et al. 2004).”