Quasar Clustering and the Lifetime of Quasars

By P. Martini, D. Weinberg. 2000

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Although the population of luminous quasars rises and falls over a period of ~109 yr, the typical lifetime of individual quasars is uncertain by several orders of magnitude. We show that quasar clustering measurements can substantially narrow the range of possible lifetimes, with the assumption that luminous quasars reside in the most massive host halos. If quasars are long-lived, then they are rare phenomena that are highly biased with respect to the underlying dark matter, while if they are short-lived they reside in more typical halos that are less strongly clustered. For a given quasar lifetime, we calculate the minimum host halo mass by matching the observed space density of quasars, using the Press-Schechter approximation. We use the results of Mo & White to calculate the clustering of these halos, and hence of the quasars they contain, as a function of quasar lifetime. A lifetime of tQ = 4 × 107 yr, the e-folding timescale of an Eddington luminosity black hole with accretion efficiency ϵ = 0.1, corresponds to a quasar correlation length of r0 ≈ 10 h-1 Mpc in low-density cosmological models at z = 2-3; this value is consistent with current clustering measurements, but these have large uncertainties. High-precision clustering measurements from the Two-Degree Field (2dF) and Sloan quasar surveys will test our key assumption of a tight correlation between quasar luminosity and host halo mass, and if this assumption holds, then they should determine tQ to a factor of 3 or better. An accurate determination of the quasar lifetime will show whether supermassive black holes acquire most of their mass during high-luminosity accretion, and it will show whether the black holes in the nuclei of typical nearby galaxies were once the central engines of high-luminosity quasars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e598d656720548906662c204e144b02363e1316

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Citations in the corpus

A Redshift Survey of the Submillimeter Galaxy Population (2004, background): “Martini & Weinberg (2001) suggest that QSOs endure for ∼40Myr, requiring that SMGs are active for ∼200–400Myr, not too discrepant from our adopted SMG timescale of 100Myr estimated above.”
Binary Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Evidence for Excess Clustering on Small Scales (2005, background): “Another interesting question is whether the quasars in these binaries have significantly longer lifetimes than ‘‘field’’ quasars (Haiman & Hui 2001; Martini & Weinberg 2001), which would have interesting implications for the masses of supermassive black holes (Wyithe & Loeb 2005) in the richest…”
The realm of the galaxy protoclusters (2016, background): “%) and lie on a relatively tight relation between QSO luminosity and halo mass (see Martini & Weinberg, 2001; Shankar et al., 2010), in contrast to the more typical optical QSOs at these and lower redshifts (see also McGreer et al., 2016).”
The clustering of intermediate-redshift quasars as measured by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (2012, background): “Comparison of the abundance of such halos to that of quasars can provide constraints on the duty cycle and degree of scatter in the observable halo-mass relation (Cole & Kaiser 1989; Martini & Weinberg 2001; Haiman & Hui 2001; White, Martini & Cohn 2008; Shankar, Weinberg & Shen 2010).”
Constraining the Evolution of the Ionizing Background and the Epoch of Reionization with z ∼ 6 Quasars. II. A Sample of 19 Quasars (2005, background): “Current observations suggest that quasar lifetimes lie in the range 105 - 108 years (e.g. Hopkins et al. 2005, Martini & Weinberg 2001).”
GALAXY ZOO: THE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT CO-EVOLUTION OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AND THEIR EARLY- AND LATE-TYPE HOST GALAXIES (2010, background): “In this paper, we explore properties of the host galaxies of AGN and the nature of their black hole growth in the local Universe (z 0.05) and discuss what these properties imply for the role of AGN in the evolution of the host galaxies.”
PRECISE BLACK HOLE MASSES FROM MEGAMASER DISKS: BLACK HOLE–BULGE RELATIONS AT LOW MASS (2010, result): “This is somewhat long compared to the∼ 107 year lifetimes typically estimated for quasars (e.g., Martini & Weinberg 2001).”
AN ALMA SURVEY OF SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES IN THE EXTENDED CHANDRA DEEP FIELD SOUTH: THE REDSHIFT DISTRIBUTION AND EVOLUTION OF SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES (2013, background): “A lifetime of 100 Myr for a QSO phase is high but not unreasonable (Martini & Weinberg 2001), however it is highly unlikely that the accretion is Eddington limited for the entirety of this period (McLure & Dunlop 2004; Kelly et al. 2010).”
The abundance and clustering of dark haloes in the standard ΛCDM cosmogony (2002, background): “A number of authors have pointed out that clustering can therefore constrain quasar lifetimes (La Franca, Andreani & Cristiani 1998; Fang & Jing 1998; Haehnelt, Natarajan & Rees 1998; Haiman & Hui 2001; Martini & Weinberg 2001; Kauffmann & Haehnelt 2001).”
The Rest-Frame Optical Properties of SCUBA Galaxies (2004, result): “The combined population will then be about 10 times more numerous than optically selected QSOs with MB > 25 at this epoch (Boyle et al. 2000).”
Clustering of intermediate redshift quasars using the final SDSS III-BOSS sample (2015, methodology): “Following the approach proposed in a range of previous works(e.g. Haiman & Hui 2001; Martini & Weinberg 2001; Wyithe & Loeb 2005), we now use our clustering measurements to constrain the host halo masses of BOSS quasars and the duty cycles of quasar activity in these halos.”
Testing the evolutionary link between submillimetre galaxies and quasars: CO observations of QSOs at z∼ 2 (2008, result): “These estimates are consistent with independent estimates of the lifetimes for QSOs of ∼ 20–40 Myr (Martini & Weinberg 2001; Goncalves et al. 2008) and ∼ 100–300 Myr for SMGs from modelling (Swinbank et al. 2006).”
An interferometric CO survey of luminous submillimetre galaxies (2005, methodology): “Adopting a QSO lifetime of40Myr (Martini & Weinberg 2001) yields a SMG life expectancy ofτSMG ∼ 200Myr — again larger than the gas consumption time scale.”
CLUSTERING OF LOW-REDSHIFT (z ⩽ 2.2) QUASARS FROM THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2008, background): “With certain reasonable assumptions, the measurement and interpretation of the bias can lead to determination of the dark matter halo properties of quasars and to quasar lifetimes (tq, Martini & Weinberg 2001; Haiman & Hui 2001).”
Clustering Analyses of 300,000 Photometrically Classified Quasars. I. Luminosity and Redshift Evolution in Quasar Bias (2006, background): “…gas physics to quasar evolution means that measurements of the luminosity function of quasars (see Richards et al. 2006 for a review) have also proved key in constraining baryonic elements of quasar evolution, e.g., quasar lifetimes via the “duty cycle” (Haiman & Hui 2001; Martini & Weinberg 2001).”
The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO survey: QSO clustering and the L-z degeneracy (2006, background): “…basis of interpretations of QSO luminosity functions (Hopkins et al. 2005b) can also be inferred from clustering measurements (Haiman & Hui 2001; Martini & Weinberg 2001; Croom et al. 2005), and hence permit discrimination between QSO evolutionary models, such as a cosmologically long-lived…”
A semi-analytic model for the co-evolution of galaxies, black holes and active galactic nuclei (2008, background): “Constraints from quasar clustering and variability imply that quasar lifetimes must be 108.5 yr (Martini & Weinberg 2001; Martini & Schneider 2003).”
SELF-CONSISTENT MODELS OF THE AGN AND BLACK HOLE POPULATIONS: DUTY CYCLES, ACCRETION RATES, AND THE MEAN RADIATIVE EFFICIENCY (2007, background): “As emphasized by Haiman & Hui (2001) and Martini & Weinberg (2001), the clustering of AGN can be a powerful diagnostic for the duty cycle of black hole activity: a high duty cycle implies that halos of AGN are rare, hence high mass, hence strongly clustered.”