The Merger History of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxies

By Kristen Menou, Zoltán Haiman, V. Narayanan. 2001

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ubiquity of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of nearby luminous galaxies can arise from the multiple mergers experienced by dark matter halos in hierarchical structure formation models, even if only a small fraction of these galaxies harbor SMBHs at high redshifts. We illustrate this possibility using cosmological Monte Carlo simulations of the merger history of dark matter halos and their associated SMBHs. In our most extreme models, in order to populate nearly every bright galaxy with an SMBH at z = 0, only a few percent of the halos with virial temperatures above 104 K are required to harbor an SMBH at high redshift. This possibility must be included in studies of the luminosity function and the clustering properties of quasars. We predict the number of SMBH merger events that are detectable by the gravitational wave experiment Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), as a function of redshift, out to z = 5. Although the event rates can be significantly reduced in scenarios with rare SMBHs, a minimum of ~10 detectable merger events per year is predicted if SMBH binaries coalesce efficiently. The observed distribution of events with redshift could yield valuable information on the SMBH formation process. If SMBH binaries do not coalesce, we find that at least several SMBH slingshot ejections probably occurred from z = 5 to the present in each galaxy more massive than ~1011 M☉ at z = 0. Although our results are sensitive to the minimum cooling mass assumed for the formation of SMBHs, we expect the qualitative predictions of our models to be robust.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6828cdfe22e7853f2207de71645a08ba10e1d82e

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Citations in the corpus

The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Constraints on Supermassive Black Hole Binaries from the Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “Many of these studies start from either semianalytic galaxy evolution models to obtain galaxy merger rates (Rajagopal & Romani 1995) or halo merger trees with added galaxies (Menou et al. 2001; Sesana et al. 2004) onto which an SMBH binary population model can be imposed.”
The Evolution of the MBH-σ Relation (2005, unknown): “…& Loeb 1998; Richstone et al. 1998; Fabian 1999; Monaco et al. 2000; Kauffmann & Haehnelt 2000; Haehnelt & Kauffmann 2000; Granato et al. 2001; Menou et al. 2001; Menci et al. 2003; Di Matteo et al. 2003, 2004; Wyithe & Loeb 2003; Wyithe 2006; Hopkins et al. 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d) and…”
Low-Frequency Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Binaries: Predictions for LISA and Pulsar Timing Arrays (2002, methodology): “The first case closely resembles the one considered by Menou et al. (2001) in which they had BHs in all halos (although they did not apply a detection limit and hence obtained much higher event rates).”
THE POPULATION OF VISCOSITY- AND GRAVITATIONAL WAVE-DRIVEN SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE BINARIES AMONG LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2009, background): “However, a large range of such BH population models can fit the observational data (e.g., Menou et al. 2001; Lippai et al. 2009).”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, methodology): “Figure 7 shows estimates for the LISA event rate, calculated for all binary mergers satisfying 104 M < (m1 + m2)(1 + z) < 107 M as (see, e.g., Menou et al. 2001), d2N dz dt = 4πc d2com(z) ΔN Δz ΔV , (21) where ΔN is the number of SMBH merger events in the tree in a time step Δz and a simulated…”
Gravitational Waves Probe the Coalescence Rate of Massive Black Hole Binaries (2002, background): “Menou et al. (2001) have instead considered theoretical calculations of the merger rate of galaxy halos.”