Most Supermassive Black Holes Must Be Rapidly Rotating

By M. Elvis, G. Risaliti, G. B. C. C. F. Astrophysics, Arcetri Observatory, B. Observatory. 2001

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the integrated spectrum of the X-ray background and quasars' spectral energy distribution to derive the contribution of quasars to the energy output of the universe. We find a lower limit for the energy from accretion onto black holes of 7% of the total luminosity of the universe and probably more, with 15% quite possible. Comparing these values with the masses of black holes in the center of nearby galaxies, we show that the accretion process must be, on average, very efficient: at least 15% of the accreted mass must be transformed into radiated energy. This further implies that most supermassive black holes are rotating rapidly.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62ffe9a045d98521b446f651ca1fe7d1228daa26

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atmospheric Science

Citations in the corpus

BINARY BLACK HOLE ACCRETION FROM A CIRCUMBINARY DISK: GAS DYNAMICS INSIDE THE CENTRAL CAVITY (2013, background): “As SMBHs are expected to gain a significant fraction of their mass through gas accretion (Soltan 1982; Yu & Tremaine 2002; Elvis et al. 2002), this suggests a mechanism which may bias the distribution of binaries near merger toward higher mass ratios.”
Cosmic evolution of quasar clustering: implications for the host haloes (2004, methodology): “For this reason we use here the results by McLure & Dunlop (2004) who, adopting the revised template spectrum by Elvis et al. (2002), estimated the bolometric corrections for 1136 quasars at 0.5 < z < 0.8 extracted from the SDSS. Corrections from the B band have then been computed using a subsample…”
Spin, Accretion, and the Cosmological Growth of Supermassive Black Holes (2004, background): “& Ap, 7, 553 Willott, C. J., McLure, R. J., & Jarvis, M. J. 2003, ApJ, 587, L15 Yishida, N., Abel, T., Hernquist, L., & Sugiyama, N. 2003, 592, 645 Yoo, J., & Miralde-Escudé, J. 2004, ApJ Letters, in press (astro-ph/0406217) Yu, Q., & Tremaine, S. 2002, MNRAS, 335, 965”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “…by black holes during the active phase, by assuming a 15 mass-to-energy conversion efficiency, (Aller and Richstone, 2002; Merloni et al, 2004; Elvis et al, 2002; Marconi et al, 2004): ρQSO(< z) = fbol(1− ) c2 ∫ z 0 ∫ L′Φ(L′, z) H0(1 + z) √ Ωm(1 + z)3 +ΩΛ dL′dz (6) where the mass accretion…”
Piecing together the X-ray background : bolometric corrections for active galactic nuclei (2007, background): “The pioneering studies of previous authors sta ted off with an assumption of constantκ2−10keV (e.g. Elvis et al. 2002, Fabian & Iwasawa 1999), followed by the studies of Fabian (2003) and Marconi et al. (2004) who pointed out the importance of taking into account a luminosity dependence.”
SELF-CONSISTENT MODELS OF THE AGN AND BLACK HOLE POPULATIONS: DUTY CYCLES, ACCRETION RATES, AND THE MEAN RADIATIVE EFFICIENCY (2007, background): “The most general and most well known of these constraints is the link between the integrated emissivity of the quasar population, the integrated mass density of remnant black holes, and the average radiative efficiency of black hole accretion (Sołtan 1982; Fabian& Iwasawa 1999; Elvis et al. 2002).”
Fueling Low-Level AGN Activity through Stochastic Accretion of Cold Gas (2006, background): “…al. 1999; Yu & Tremaine 2002; Marconi et al. 2004; Shankar et al. 2004), background synthesis models (e.g., Comastri et al. 1995; Gilli et al. 1999; Elvis et al. 2002; Ueda et al. 2003; Cao 2005), and observations of the accretion rate distribution (Vestergaard 2004; Heckman et al. 2004; McLure &…”
Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research (2004, background): “…of the X-ray background, the general consensus being that luminous X-ray absorbed AGNs, possibly showing a fast redshift evolution, are necessary to reproduce the 2 − 10 keV integrated source spectrum (Fabian & Iwasawa 1999; Salucci et al. 1999; Gilli, Salvati & Hasinger 2001; Elvis et al. 2002).”
Early Growth and Efficient Accretion of Massive Black Holes at High Redshift (2003, background): “For example, for two of the objects studied by Bechtold et al. the UV slopes are measured by Fan et al. and the resulting αOX are 1.47 and 1.48, much closer to the average of 1.43 measured at lower redshifts (Elvis et al. 2002; note that the are slightly overestimated9.”
Bulge mass is king: the dominant role of the bulge in determining the fraction of passive galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2014, background): “…energy via the accretion process. η is permitted to vary from 0 - 0.37 on theoretical grounds, see Thorne (1974), and is observationally found to reside at a value around 0.1, with no indication of redshift or luminosity dependence (e.g. Elvis et al. 1994, Elvis et al. 2002, Bluck et al. 2011).”
Total and Jet Blandford-Znajek Power in the Presence of an Accretion Disk (2005, background): “Based upon Sołtan-type arguments, AGNs each probably harbor a rapidly rotating (a/M ∼ 0.9–0.95) black hole (Urry & Padovani 1995; Elvis et al. 2002; Gammie et al. 2004; Shapiro 2005).”