Probing the Coevolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxies Using Gravitationally Lensed Quasar Hosts

By C. Peng, Christopher Impey, Hans-Walter Rix, C. Kochanek, C. Keeton, Emilio E. Falco, Joseph Lehar, B. McLeod. 2006

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In the present-day universe, supermassive black hole masses (ℳBH) appear to be strongly correlated with their galaxy's bulge luminosity, among other properties. In this study we explore the analogous relationship between ℳBH, derived using the virial method, and the stellar R-band bulge luminosity (LR) or stellar bulge mass (ℳ*) at epochs of 1 ≲ z ≲ 4.5, using a sample of 31 gravitationally lensed AGNs and 20 nonlensed AGNs. At redshifts z > 1.7 (10-12 Gyr ago), we find that the observed ℳBH-LR relation is nearly the same (to within ~0.3 mag) as it is today. When the observed LR are corrected for luminosity evolution, this means that the black holes grew in mass faster than their hosts, with the ℳBH/ℳ* mass ratio being a factor of ≳4 times larger at z > 1.7 than it is today. By the redshift range 1 ≲ z ≲ 1.7 (8-10 Gyr ago), the ℳBH/ℳ* ratio is at most 2 times higher than today, but it may be consistent with no evolution. Combining the results, we conclude that the ratio ℳBH/ℳ* rises with look-back time, although it may saturate at ≈6 times the local value. Scenarios in which moderately luminous quasar hosts at z ≳ 1.7 were fully formed bulges that passively faded to the present epoch are ruled out.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99ae38a4d5fa5366076242b1c5731a1b188b3ce7

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Citations in the corpus

The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, background): “At z > 0 the shape and normalization of the BH–galaxy correlations are subject of debate (e.g. Peng et al. 2006; Jahnke et al. 2009; Merloni 2010; Cisternas et al. 2011; Targett, Dunlop & McLure Figure 3.”
Selection Bias in Observing the Cosmological Evolution of the M•-σ and M•-L Relationships (2007, methodology): “Peng et al. (2006a) and Peng et al. (2006b) measured the bulge luminosities of a combined sample 51 AGN hosts at z > 1 using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST ), estimating their black hole masses using the photoionization method.”
EDDINGTON-LIMITED ACCRETION AND THE BLACK HOLE MASS FUNCTION AT REDSHIFT 6 (2010, background): “…involving AGN tend to show higher than local ratios of MBH/Mstellar at all redshifts; z < 1 (Mathur & Grupe 2005; Woo et al. 2008), 1 < z < 4 (Peng et al. 2006; McLure et al. 2006; Merloni et al. 2010); z > 4 (Walter et al. 2004; Riechers et al. 2008; Wang et al. 2010), whereas studies based…”
An ALMA [C ii] Survey of 27 Quasars at z > 5.94 (2018, background): “…Telescope (e.g., Dunlop et al. 2003; Bennert et al. 2011; Schramm & Silverman 2013; Park et al. 2015), in some cases aided by natural magnification (Peng et al. 2006; Ding et al. 2017), point toward a higher black hole to host galaxy mass ratio in quasars at redshift z=1–4, compared to local…”
Four Quasars above Redshift 6 Discovered by the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey (2007, background): “…evolution of this relation with redshift is not well known and attempts are now being made to determine the relation up toz = 3 because it is a crucial component of galaxy evolution models (Shields et al. 2003; Adelberger & Steidel 2005; Alexander et al. 2005; Peng et al. 2006; McLure et al. 2006).”
DETAILED DECOMPOSITION OF GALAXY IMAGES. II. BEYOND AXISYMMETRIC MODELS (2009, background): “…(Ravindranath et al. 2002; Kormendy & Bender 2009), black hole vs. bulge relations (Kormendy & Richstone 1995) and their evolution (Rix et al. 2001; Peng et al. 2006a,b), the “extra light” due to gas dissipation in galaxy centers (Kormendy 1999; Kormendy 2 et al. 2009; Hopkins et al. 2008b,a),…”
THE SIZES OF THE X-RAY AND OPTICAL EMISSION REGIONS OF RXJ 1131–1231 (2009, result): “For the Kaspi et al. (2005) normalization we obtainM1131 = (6.9± 1.6)× 107M⊙, which is consistent with the earlier estimate of Peng et al. (2006) of6× 107M⊙ also using the Kaspi et al. (2005) normalizations.”
Black Holes in Pseudobulges and Spheroidals: A Change in the Black Hole-Bulge Scaling Relations at Low Mass (2008, methodology): “At redshifts ranging from 0:37 < z < 6:4 numerous authors have found evidence for evolution in BH-host scaling relations, but the ratio of BH to bulge mass appears to increase at earlier times (e.g., Peng et al. 2006a, 2006b;Woo et al. 2006; Shields et al. 2006; Salviander et al. 2007; Ho 2007).”
A Theoretical Interpretation of the Black Hole Fundamental Plane (2007, methodology): “This provides a completely independent measurement ofMBH/M∗ from that of Peng et al. (2006), with entirely different systematics, but nevertheless is in reasonable agreement with their estimates, and with our simple expectation from the BHFP relation.”
The quasar relation through cosmic time – II. Evidence for evolution from z = 3 to the present age (2009, background): “studies suggest that, for a given galaxy mass, black holes in high-z AGN are more massive than their low-z counter-parts (e.g., McLure et al. 2006; Peng et al. 2006a,b).”
WHAT TURNS GALAXIES OFF? THE DIFFERENT MORPHOLOGIES OF STAR-FORMING AND QUIESCENT GALAXIES SINCE z ∼ 2 FROM CANDELS (2011, result): “Given correlations between black hole mass, bulge mass, velocity dispersion and Sérsic index (Häring & Rix 2004; Peng et al. 2006; Graham & Driver 2007; Gültekin et al. 2009), our results tentatively support the AGN feedback paradigm, at least at the qualitative level.”
ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS HOST GALAXY MORPHOLOGIES IN COSMOS (2009, background): “Peng et al. (2006c) came to a similar conclusion when studying the host galaxies of gravitationally lensed quasars—30–50% of quasar hosts in their z > 1 sample have disk-dominated morphologies.”
Self-regulated growth of supermassive black holes by a dual jet-heating active galactic nucleus feedback mechanism: methods, tests and implications for cosmological simulations (2011, background): “Despite these difficulties, an increasing amount of data is suggesting that the MBH–Ms relationship shows some positive evolution with redshift (McLure et al. 2006; Peng et al. 2006; Shields et al. 2006; Salviander et al. 2007; Bennert et al. 2010; Decarli et al. 2010; Merloni et al. 2010).”
The Spitzer/IRAC view of black hole–bulge scaling relations (2010, methodology): “On the contrary the total stellar mass of the host galaxy is relatively easier to estimate from host galaxy luminosities and colors (e.g. Peng et al. 2006), or by deconvolving AGN and galaxy spectral energy distributions (Merloni et al. 2010) or by applying the correlation between the AGN…”
A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. I. Galaxy Mergers and Quasar Activity (2007, background): “Again, (z) has been directly determined from observations (Peng et al. 2006) and estimated from theoretical arguments (Hopkins et al. 2007c).”
A survey of molecular gas in luminous sub-millimetre galaxies (2012, result): “Interferometric observations of far-IR-bright QSOs could be a way to approach this phase from the ‘other side’, potentially shedding light on this interesting problem (Simpson et al. 2012 – see also Walter et al. 2004; Riechers et al. 2008).”
Dusty Star Forming Galaxies at High Redshift (2014, background): “They find that SMGs have black-hole masses to galaxy mass ratios 3–5× lower than local relationship (Häring and Rix, 2004), and much lower than other highredshift populations of AGN (McLure et al., 2006; Peng et al., 2006).”