ONGOING AND CO-EVOLVING STAR FORMATION IN zCOSMOS GALAXIES HOSTING ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI

By J. Silverman, F. Lamareille, C. Maier, S. Lilly, V. Mainieri, M. Brusa, N. Cappelluti, G. Hasinger, G. Zamorani, M. Scodeggio and 54 more. 2008

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a study of the host galaxies of active galactic nucleus (AGN) selected from the zCOSMOS survey to establish if accretion onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and star formation are explicitly linked up to z ∼ 1. We identify 152 galaxies that harbor AGN, based on their X-ray emission (L0.5–10 keV>1042 erg s−1) detected by XMM-Newton observations of 7543 galaxies (iacs < 22.5). Star formation rates (SFRs), including those weighted by stellar mass, of a subsample are determined using the [O ii]λ3727 emission-line luminosity, corrected for an AGN contribution based on the observed [O iii]λ5007 strength or that inferred by their hard (2–10 keV) X-ray luminosity. We find that an overwhelming majority of AGN host galaxies have significant levels of star formation with a distribution spanning ∼1–100 M☉ yr−1; their average SFR is higher than that of galaxies with equivalent stellar mass (M*>4 × 1010 M☉). The close association between AGN activity and star formation is further substantiated by an increase in the fraction of galaxies hosting AGN with the youthfulness of their stars as indicated by the rest-frame color (U−V) and spectral index Dn(4000); we demonstrate that a mass-selected sample is required to alleviate an artificial peak in the AGN fraction falling in the transition region due to the fact that many “blue cloud” galaxies have low mass-to-light ratios in luminosity-limited samples. We also find that the SFRs of AGN hosts evolve with cosmic time in a manner that closely mirrors the overall galaxy population and naturally explains the low SFRs in AGNs (z < 0.3) from the SDSS. We conclude that the conditions most conducive for AGN activity are a massive host galaxy and a large reservoir of gas. Furthermore, a direct correlation between mass-accretion rate onto SMBHs and SFR is shown to be weak although the average ratio (∼10−2) is constant with redshift, effectively shifting the evidence for a co-evolution scenario in a statistical manner to smaller physical scales (i.e., within the same galaxies). The order-of-magnitude increase in this ratio compared to the locally measured value of MBH/Mbulge is consistent with an AGN lifetime substantially shorter than that of star formation. Our findings illustrate an intermittent scenario with underlying complexities regarding fueling over vastly different physical (and temporal) scales yet to be firmly determined.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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PRIMUS: THE DEPENDENCE OF AGN ACCRETION ON HOST STELLAR MASS AND COLOR (2011, background): “Silverman et al. (2009a) found that X-ray AGN activity was associated with ongoing star formation, and thus the AGN fraction is higher in the blue cloud.”
GOODS-Herschel: the far-infrared view of star formation in active galactic nucleus host galaxies since z ≈ 3 (2011, background): “…optical spectral features (e.g., the 4000Å break, the strengths of the HδA absorption and[O II ] emission lines), which have been applied extensively to large scale spectral surveys to measure the properties of large numbers of AGN host galaxies(e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2003; Silverman et al. 2009).”
Accretion and star formation rates in low‐redshift type II active galactic nuclei (2009, result): “The constant (115) in the above equation is similar to the one found by Silverman et al. (2009) in their analysis of the BH growth rate and SFR in zCOSMOS galaxies (see their Fig.”
THE XMM-NEWTON WIDE-FIELD SURVEY IN THE COSMOS FIELD (XMM-COSMOS): DEMOGRAPHY AND MULTIWAVELENGTH PROPERTIES OF OBSCURED AND UNOBSCURED LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, background): “…al. 2009); the host galaxies properties of AGN in COSMOS (Gabor et al. 2009); the on-going and co-evolving starformation and AGN activity at z< 0.8 (Silverman et al. 2009a); the environments of AGN within the galaxies density field (Silverman et al. 2009b); the relation of the X–ray and optical…”
The mean star formation rate of X-ray selected active galaxies and its evolution from z~2.5: results from PEP-Herschel (2012, methodology): “Silverman et al. (2009), using the SF sensitive [O II]λ3727 emission line, found wide-spread SF in low and moderate luminosity AGN hosts at levels comparable to inactive galaxies of similar stellar mass. AGN host colors paint a similar picture (Xue et al. 2010; Rosario et al. 2011).”
A CORRELATION BETWEEN STAR FORMATION RATE AND AVERAGE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION IN STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2013, background): “Studies of redshift evolution of SFR density (e.g. Hopkins & Beacom 2006; Rodighiero et al. 2010) and BHAR density (e.g. Silverman et al. 2009; Aird et al. 2010) suggest that the SFR and BHAR densities are higher at higher redshift (up toz ∼ 2).”
BLACK HOLE VARIABILITY AND THE STAR FORMATION–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS CONNECTION: DO ALL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES HOST AN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS? (2013, background): “…& Merritt 2000; Gültekin et al. 2009), the remarkable similarity between the global histories of SF and BH accretion (e.g., Boyle & Terlevich 1998; Silverman et al. 2008; Aird et al. 2010; Merloni & Heinz 2013), and the observed tendency of luminous active galactic nuclei (AGNs) to reside in…”
COLOR–MAGNITUDE RELATIONS OF ACTIVE AND NON-ACTIVE GALAXIES IN THE CHANDRA DEEP FIELDS: HIGH-REDSHIFT CONSTRAINTS AND STELLAR-MASS SELECTION EFFECTS (2010, background): “…for X-ray luminous AGNs), which agrees with the result obtained in § 5.2 that most AGNs reside in massive hosts and extends previous findings to higher redshifts (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2003; Best et al. 2005; Bundy et al. 2008; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2009; Brusa et al. 2009; Silverman et al. 2009).”
How do massive black holes get their gas (2009, background): “These predictions agree reasonably well with current observations (Wu & Cao 2006; Wang et al. 2007; Silverman et al. 2009).”
THE HIDDEN “AGN MAIN SEQUENCE”: EVIDENCE FOR A UNIVERSAL BLACK HOLE ACCRETION TO STAR FORMATION RATE RATIO SINCE z ∼ 2 PRODUCING AN MBH–M* RELATION (2012, background): “…in exploring the links between ongoing SMBH and galaxy growth stems partly from scatter introduced by the different duty cycles of AGN and star-formation episodes, leading to what appears to be only very weak correlations between the two events (e.g., Silverman et al. 2009; Mullaney et al. 2012).”
Enhanced star formation rates in AGN hosts with respect to inactive galaxies from PEP-Herschel observations (2012, methodology): “Silverman et al. (2009b) used [O II] (λ = 3727Å) as a star formation indicator to look for enhanced star formation inz .”
Accretion-driven evolution of black holes: Eddington ratios, duty cycles and active galaxy fractions (2011, result): “Silverman et al. (2009) also find that in relatively massive high-z galaxies the ratio between average black hole accretion rate and SFR is higher by up to an order of magnitude with respect to the classical 10−3, in fair agreement with the prediction of the G(z,MBH) model, though dependent on the…”
THE zCOSMOS 10k-BRIGHT SPECTROSCOPIC SAMPLE (2009, background): “…function (Gilli et al. 2009; Meneux et al. 2009; de la Torre et al. 2009; C. Porciani et al. 2009, in preparation), and studies of active galactic nucleus (AGN; Brusa et al. 2009; Silverman et al. 2009a, 2009b), far-IR (Caputi et al. 2008, 2009), and radio sources (Bardelli et al. 2009).”
The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe (2014, background): “…investigations of the less powerful AGN population over the same range in redshift (e.g. Pierce et al. 2007, Gabor et al. 2009, Hickox et al. 2009, Silverman et al. 2009, 2011, Schawinski et al. 2011, Kocevski et al. 2012, Mullaney et al. 2012a,b, Aird et al. 2012, 2013, Bohm et al. 2013, Rosario…”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “There is a general correlation between star-formation rate (SFR) and mass accretion rate for individual distant AGNs (e.g., Schweitzer et al., 2006; Lutz et al., 2008; Shi et al., 2009; Silverman et al., 2009b; Trichas et al., 2009; Rafferty et al., 2011).”