A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN.
By F. Stanley, C. Harrison, D. M. Alexander, A. M. Swinbank, J. Aird, A. Moro, R. Hickox, James Mullaney. 2015
141 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this study, we investigate the relationship between the star formation rate (SFR) and AGN luminosity (LAGNLAGN) for ∼2000 X-ray detected AGN. The AGN span over three orders of magnitude in X-ray luminosity (1042<L2−8keV<1045.5ergs−11042<L2−8keV<1045.5ergs−1) and are in the redshift range z = 0.2–2.5. Using infrared (IR) photometry (8–500 μmμm), including deblended Spitzer and Herschel images and taking into account photometric upper limits, we decompose the IR spectral energy distributions into AGN and star formation components. Using the IR luminosities due to star formation, we investigate the average SFRs as a function of redshift and AGN luminosity. In agreement with previous studies, we find a strong evolution of the average SFR with redshift, tracking the observed evolution of the overall star-forming galaxy population. However, we find that the relationship between the average SFR and AGN luminosity is broadly flat at all redshifts and across all the AGN luminosities investigated; in comparison to previous studies, we find less scatter amongst the average SFRs across the wide range of AGN luminosities investigated. By comparing to empirical models, we argue that the observed flat relationship is due to short time-scale variations in AGN luminosity, driven by changes in the mass accretion rate, which wash out any underlying correlations between SFR and LAGNLAGN. Furthermore, we show that the exact form of the predicted relationship between SFR and AGN luminosity (and its normalization) is highly sensitive to the assumed intrinsic Eddington ratio distribution.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/763c5a3e646ef296da61b93f09efb5af9f85a427
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
Citations in the corpus
- x-cigale: fitting AGN/galaxy SEDs from X-ray to infrared (2020, methodology): “However, the AGN hosts tend to have normal levels of star-formation activity, as shown by previous studies (e.g. Harrison et al. 2012; Stanley et al. 2015). ized as E(B − V)) is a free parameter set by the user, and setting E(B − V) = 0 returns to the original torus.”
- Impact of supermassive black hole growth on star formation (2017, background): “The studies that contain some of the largest samples of AGN host galaxies, that have simultaneously taken into account redshift and stellar mass and that have applied uniform techniques across their samples find that average star-formation rates are independent of AGN luminosity[77, 78, 79, 80] (Fig”