CONSTRAINTS ON BLACK HOLE GROWTH, QUASAR LIFETIMES, AND EDDINGTON RATIO DISTRIBUTIONS FROM THE SDSS BROAD-LINE QUASAR BLACK HOLE MASS FUNCTION

By B. Kelly, M. Vestergaard, Xiaohui Fan, P. Hopkins, L. Hernquist, Aneta Siemiginowska. 2010

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an estimate of the black hole mass function of broad-line quasars (BLQSOs) that self-consistently corrects for incompleteness and the statistical uncertainty in the mass estimates, based on a sample of 9886 quasars at 1 < z < 4.5 drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We find evidence for “cosmic downsizing” of black holes in BLQSOs, where the peak in their number density shifts to higher redshift with increasing black hole mass. The cosmic mass density for black holes seen as BLQSOs peaks at z ∼ 2. We estimate the completeness of the SDSS as a function of the black hole mass and Eddington ratio, and find that at z > 1 it is highly incomplete at MBH ≲ 109 M☉ and L/LEdd ≲ 0.5. We estimate a lower limit on the lifetime of a single BLQSO phase to be tBL > 150 ± 15 Myr for black holes at z = 1 with a mass of MBH = 109 M☉, and we constrain the maximum mass of a black hole in a BLQSO to be ∼3 × 1010 M☉. Our estimated distribution of BLQSO Eddington ratios peaks at L/LEdd ∼ 0.05 and has a dispersion of ∼0.4 dex, implying that most BLQSOs are not radiating at or near the Eddington limit; however, the location of the peak is subject to considerable uncertainty. The steep increase in number density of BLQSOs toward lower Eddington ratios is expected if the BLQSO accretion rate monotonically decays with time. Furthermore, our estimated lifetime and Eddington ratio distributions imply that the majority of the most massive black holes spend a significant amount of time growing in an earlier obscured phase, a conclusion which is independent of the unknown obscured fraction. These results are consistent with models for self-regulated black hole growth, at least for massive systems at z > 1, where the BLQSO phase occurs at the end of a fueling event when black hole feedback unbinds the accreting gas, halting the accretion flow.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9bf3b12fa95901084f8486e6527fb690cd882478

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. M. Alexander
2. L. Hernquist
3. P. Hopkins
4. R. Hickox
5. W. N. Brandt
6. F. Walter
7. Volker Springel
8. H. Netzer

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. D. M. Alexander
2. R. Ivison
3. I. Smail
4. S. Chapman
5. H. Netzer
6. Yue Shen
7. F. Walter
8. Xin Liu

Citations in the corpus

• REVERBERATION MAPPING RESULTS FOR FIVE SEYFERT 1 GALAXIES (2012, background): “This can be used to investigate the evolution of the BH mass function (e.g., Greene & Ho 2007; Vestergaard et al. 2008; Vestergaard & Osmer 2009; Kelly et al. 2010), the growth of BHs compared to their hosts, the Eddington ratios of quasars (e.g., Kollmeier et al. 2006; Kelly et al. 2010), and even…”
• Black Hole Growth to z = 2 - I: Improved Virial Methods for Measuring M_BH and L/L_Edd (2012, methodology): “The treatment of this issue requires the application of dedicated statistical methods (e.g., Kelly et al. 2010, NT07), which is beyond the scope of this paper.”
• 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).”
• PRIMUS: THE DEPENDENCE OF AGN ACCRETION ON HOST STELLAR MASS AND COLOR (2011, result): “They find that broad-line QSOs are predominantly at higher λEdd∼ 0.1, consistent with other studies of the Eddington ratio distribution of QSOs (e.g., Kollmeier et al. 2006; Gavignaud et al. 2008; Kelly et al. 2010).”
• COMPARING SINGLE-EPOCH VIRIAL BLACK HOLE MASS ESTIMATORS FOR LUMINOUS QUASARS (2012, background): “Recognizing and accounting for the uncertainties in these virial mass estimates is crucial in essentially all BH mass related studies (e.g., Shen et al. 2008; Kelly et al. 2009, 2010; Shen & Kelly”
• THE RADIATIVE EFFICIENCY OF ACCRETION FLOWS IN INDIVIDUAL ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, background): “A more sophisticated analysis, along the lines of Kelly et al. (2010) is beyond the scope of the present work and possibly not amenable to our limited sample size.”
• Faint high-redshift AGN in the Chandra deep field south: the evolution of the AGN luminosity function and black hole demography (2011, methodology): “The only regime where our estimates are significantly higher than the Kelly et al. ones is that of the highest masses (log M > 9.3 M ) at z ∼ 1, where the Kelly et al. (2010) function drops steeply, while our function decreases more smoothly.”
• The LABOCA survey of the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South: clustering of submillimetre galaxies (2011, background): “…estimates are highly uncertain (e.g. Marconi et al. 2008; Fine et al. 2010; Netzer & Marziani 2010) and may suffer from significant selection effects (e.g. Lauer et al. 2007; Kelly et al. 2010; Shen & Kelly 2010), and so conclusions about connections between populations are necessarily limited.”
• BLACK HOLE VARIABILITY AND THE STAR FORMATION–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS CONNECTION: DO ALL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES HOST AN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS? (2013, background): “…have yielded similarly broad distributions that cut off at high Eddington ratios and increase to low accretion rates, although the slopes of these distributions on the low end are less well-constrained than for X-ray selected samples (e.g., Nobuta et al. 2012; Kelly et al. 2010; Kelly & Shen 2013).”
• Accretion-driven evolution of black holes: Eddington ratios, duty cycles and active galaxy fractions (2011, background): “As a set of representative examples of the literature, we consider the Kollmeier et al. (2006; K06 hereafter) results for broad-line optically luminous quasars at z > 0.5, the Hickox et al. (2009; H09 hereafter) results at z ≈ 0.5 for a sample selected by X-ray, infrared, and radio emission, and Kau”
• What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “Indeed, a full Bayesian treatment of the observed distributions suggests that the typical intrinsic Eddington ratio for massive BHs at high z is closer to λ ≈ 0.05 or lower (Kelly et al., 2010).”
• Cosmological simulations of black hole growth: AGN luminosities and downsizing (2013, background): “The peaks of the distributions are shifted towards lower Eddington ratios with decreasing redshift, in qualitative agreement with observational studies (Vestergaard 2003; Kollmeier et al. 2006; Kelly et al. 2010; Schulze & Wisotzki 2010; Kelly & Shen 2013).”
• EVIDENCE FOR NON-EVOLVING Fe ii/Mg ii RATIOS IN RAPIDLY ACCRETING z ∼ 6 QSOs (2011, background): “Kelly et al. (2010) and Willott et al. (2010a) have shown that the intrinsic Eddington ratio distribution for a volume limited QSO sample is indeed shifted towards lower values with respect to a luminosity selected population.”
• AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO MEASURING REVERBERATION LAGS IN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, background): “…and evolution with redshift (e.g., Kollmeier et al. 2006; Peng et al. 2006; Hopkins & Hernquist 2006; Shankar et al. 2009; Steinhardt & Elvis 2010; Kelly et al. 2010), thus providing valuable insights into the mystery of black hole growth and its connection to galaxy evolution at high redshift,…”
• The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, background): “At higher redshift, the mass function has been estimated only for broad-line quasars and AGN (Type 1, Kelly et al. 2010; Kelly & Shen 2013; Schulze et al. 2015), which are only the subset of quasars for which broad lines can be seen, i.e. with a favourable viewing angle and unobscured.”