Black Hole Spin and Galactic Morphology

By M. Volonteri, M. Sikora, Jan Lasota. 2007

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the conjecture by Sikora, Stawarz, and Lasota that the observed active galactic nuclei (AGNs) radio loudness bimodality can be explained by the morphology-related bimodality of black hole spin distribution in the centers of galaxies: central black holes (BHs) in giant elliptical galaxies may have (on average) much larger spins than black holes in spiral/disk galaxies. We study how accretion from a warped disk influences the evolution of black hole spins and conclude that within the cosmological framework, where the most massive BHs have grown in mass via merger-driven accretion, one indeed expects most supermassive black holes in elliptical galaxies to have on average higher spin than black holes in spiral galaxies, where random, small accretion episodes (e.g., tidally disrupted stars, accretion of molecular clouds) might have played a more important role.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a28311491da242237d54da4c69dd3a8a6b71278a

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

Cosmological Black Hole Spin Evolution by Mergers and Accretion (2008, background): “This is indeed a simplistic assumption, especially for low-redshift faint AGNs: see Volonteri et al. (2007) for a detailed analysis of the connection between spin evolution and galaxy morphology.”
BLACK HOLE SPIN AND THE RADIO LOUD/QUIET DICHOTOMY OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2009, background): “More plausible is a factor of ∼3 difference in the median values of a in the two populations (e.g., see Volonteri et al. 2007), but this will produce only a factor of ∼10 difference in jet power, not 103.”
Grand unification of AGN activity in the ΛCDM cosmology (2009, background): “We denote the angular momentum of the disc asJd (see King et al. 2005 and Volonteri et al. 2007 for a discussion of the nature ofJd), and define the total angular momentum vector J tot as J tot = Jbh + Jd. (7) The angleθ betweenJbh andJd is defined such that0 6 θ 6 π; the valuesθ = 0 and θ = π…”
THE EVOLUTION OF SWIFT/BAT BLAZARS AND THE ORIGIN OF THE MeV BACKGROUND (2009, background): “As a natural consequence, it is believed that merging activity would produce a rapidly spinning black hole (e.g. Volonteri et al. 2007) which on theoretical grounds, is required to explain the production of a collimated, relativistic, outflow (Blandford & Znajek 1977; Blandford et al. 1990).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “One unanswered question is whether this symbiosis extends down to the lowest galaxy and black hole masses due to changes in the accretion properties (Mathur and Grupe, 2005), dynamical effects (Volonteri et al., 2007), or cosmic bias (Volonteri and Natarajan, 2009).”