The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation

By M. Volonteri, Y. Dubois, C. Pichon, J. Devriendt. 2016

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyse the demographics of black holes (BHs) in the large-volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Horizon-AGN. This simulation statistically models how much gas is accreted on to BHs, traces the energy deposited into their environment and, consequently, the back-reaction of the ambient medium on BH growth. The synthetic BHs reproduce a variety of observational constraints such as the redshift evolution of the BH mass density and the mass function. Strong self-regulation via AGN feedback, weak supernova feedback, and unresolved internal processes result in a tight BH–galaxy mass correlation. Starting at z ∼ 2, tidal stripping creates a small population of BHs over-massive with respect to the halo. The fraction of galaxies hosting a central BH or an AGN increases with stellar mass. The AGN fraction agrees better with multi-wavelength studies, than single-wavelength ones, unless obscuration is taken into account. The most massive haloes present BH multiplicity, with additional BHs gained by ongoing or past mergers. In some cases, both a central and an off-centre AGN shine concurrently, producing a dual AGN. This dual AGN population dwindles with decreasing redshift, as found in observations. Specific accretion rate and Eddington ratio distributions are in good agreement with observational estimates. The BH population is dominated in turn by fast, slow, and very slow accretors, with transitions occurring at z = 3 and z = 2, respectively.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6357088994177534839d1c5806f5f5e9dcb440cc

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Citations in the corpus

Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, methodology): “The scatter in the simulation prediction is smaller than in the observational sample, which is a generic feature of many simulation models (e.g. Volonteri et al. 2016, their Section 3.3 and references therein).”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, methodology): “…simulations such as Illustris (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Genel et al. 2014), Magneticum (Hirschmann et al. 2014), Horizon-AGN (Dubois et al. 2014; Volonteri et al. 2016; Kaviraj et al. 2017), Eagle (Schaye et al. 2015), MassiveBlack (Khandai et al. 2015), Blue Tides (Feng et al. 2016), Romulus…”
The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, methodology): “To associate BHs with galaxies, we take the most massive BH within 10 % of the virial radius of the galaxy, or 3 kpc if this value is smaller (see Volonteri et al. 2016 for the BH-to-galaxy-mass relation in Horizon-AGN).”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, background): “…a power law over a larger mass range, although we do not here model bulge masses in any way (for the differences resulting in modeling the bulge see Volonteri et al. 2016; Weinberger et al. 2017); (v) the halo gas fractions at the group scale are in much better agreement; and (vi) the lowmass…”
The Horizon-AGN simulation: evolution of galaxy properties over cosmic time (2016, background): “This study is part of a series of papers that will explore the cosmic evolution of black holes (Volonteri et al. 2016, Beckmann et al. in prep), the morphological transformation of galaxies (Dubois et al. in prep) and dark-matter cusp-core modulation by AGN activity (Peirani et al. in prep).”
The COSMOS2015 galaxy stellar mass function . Thirteen billion years of stellar mass assembly in ten snapshots (2017, background): “By tracing their mass assembly as a function of time, Volonteri et al. (2016) find that black holes with Eddington ratio <0.01 (those responsible for radio-mode feedback in the simulation) are the dominant population at z .”
Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, background): “Bellovary et al. (2011), Dubois et al. (2012a), Taylor & Kobayashi (2014), Dubois, Volonteri & Silk (2014) and Volonteri et al. (2016) instead seed BHs in high gas density peaks, in some cases with a metallicity criterion, with fixed BH mass in the range 10 ≤ M ≤ 105 M .”
Constraining Stellar-mass Black Hole Mergers in AGN Disks Detectable with LIGO (2017, background): “Note that if NGN were in fact lower as in, e.g., Georgakakis et al. (2015) and Volonteri et al. (2016), then the lower bound to NGN as estimated by us could drop by several orders of magnitude, which would obviously impact the rate of range.”
Simulating galaxy formation with black hole driven thermal and kinetic feedback (2016, background): “However, Volonteri et al. (2016) showed that the shape and scatter of the low-mass end changes significantly for different ways to measure Mbulge.”