Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey

By A. Goulding, Jenny E. Greene, R. Bezanson, J. Greco, S. Johnson, A. Leauthaud, Y. Matsuoka, Elinor Medezinski, Adrian M. Price-Whelan. 2017

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Collisions and interactions between gas-rich galaxies are thought to be pivotal stages in their formation and evolution, causing the rapid production of new stars, and possibly serving as a mechanism for fueling supermassive black holes (BH). Harnessing the exquisite spatial resolution (~0.5 arcsec) afforded by the first ~170 deg^2 of the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Survey, we present our new constraints on the importance of galaxy-galaxy major mergers (1:4) in growing BHs throughout the last ~8 Gyrs. Utilizing mid-infrared observations in the WISE All-Sky survey, we robustly select active galactic nuclei (AGN) and mass-matched control galaxy samples, totaling ~140,000 spectroscopically confirmed systems at i 10^45 erg/s) systematically reside in merging systems over non-interacting galaxies. Our findings show that galaxy-galaxy interactions do, on average, trigger luminous AGN activity substantially more often than in secularly evolving non-interacting galaxies, and we further suggest that the BH growth rate may be closely tied to the dynamical time of the merger system.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/495bc1f4a79bd01c648f9c40865af367e6812b8e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Zoltán Haiman
2. M. Volonteri
3. A. Sesana
4. L. Hernquist
5. M. Colpi
6. E. Lusso
7. M. Dotti
8. S. Bianchi

Citations in the corpus

• Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei (2018, unknown): “Recent results indicate clearly that merging galaxies are more likely to host AGN than isolated galaxies with otherwise similar properties (e.g., Ellison et al. 2013; Weston et al. 2017; Goulding et al. 2017), but whether these mergers are associated with obscuration remains unsettled.”
• The quest for dual and binary supermassive black holes: A multi-messenger view (2019, background): “selection of AGN and mergers (Donley et al., 2007; Urrutia et al., 2008; Veilleux et al., 2009; Assef et al., 2013; Glikman et al., 2015; Fan et al., 2016; Goulding et al., 2018), highlighting the fact that a large number of objects are missed by optical classification because of heavy extinction an”