PRIMUS: THE DEPENDENCE OF AGN ACCRETION ON HOST STELLAR MASS AND COLOR

By J. Aird, A. Coil, John Moustakas, M. Blanton, S. Burles, R. Cool, Daniel J. Eisenstein, M. Smith, Kenneth C. Wong, G. Zhu. 2011

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present evidence that the incidence of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and the distribution of their accretion rates do not depend on the stellar masses of their host galaxies, contrary to previous studies. We use hard (2–10 keV) X-ray data from three extragalactic fields (XMM-LSS, COSMOS, and ELAIS-S1) with redshifts from the Prism Multi-object Survey to identify 242 AGNs with L2–10 keV = 1042–44 erg s−1 within a parent sample of ∼25,000 galaxies at 0.2 < z < 1.0 over ∼3.4 deg2 and to i ∼ 23. We find that although the fraction of galaxies hosting an AGN at fixed X-ray luminosity rises strongly with stellar mass, the distribution of X-ray luminosities is independent of mass. Furthermore, we show that the probability that a galaxy will host an AGN can be defined by a universal Eddington ratio distribution that is independent of the host galaxy stellar mass and has a power-law shape with slope −0.65. These results demonstrate that AGNs are prevalent at all stellar masses in the range and that the same physical processes regulate AGN activity in all galaxies in this stellar mass range. While a higher AGN fraction may be observed in massive galaxies, this is a selection effect related to the underlying Eddington ratio distribution. We also find that the AGN fraction drops rapidly between z ∼ 1 and the present day and is moderately enhanced (factor ∼2) in galaxies with blue or green optical colors. Consequently, while AGN activity and star formation appear to be globally correlated, we do not find evidence that the presence of an AGN is related to the quenching of star formation or the color transformation of galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db41a6eced00563eaf43d116d6a0981b1860add5

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Citations in the corpus

A UNIFIED EMPIRICAL MODEL FOR INFRARED GALAXY COUNTS BASED ON THE OBSERVED PHYSICAL EVOLUTION OF DISTANT GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “(10) The last step uses theM⋆-SFR correlation. βAGN = −0.7 comes from Aird et al. (2012).”
Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, methodology): “However, there is evidence for differences in the normalisation (and potentially the shape) of the L/LEdd distribution between quiescent and star-forming host galaxies (e.g. Aird et al. 2012; Azadi et al. 2015; see Fig.”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, methodology): “…environment, AGN content, and dark-matter halo mass are critical for determining galaxy quenching, and the evolution of galaxy bimodality (e.g., Weinmann et al. 2006; Bell et al. 2007; Kimm et al. 2009; Peng et al. 2010; Wetzel et al. 2012; Woo et al. 2012; Aird et al. 2012; Knobel et al. 2012).”
Constraining the properties of AGN host galaxies with spectral energy distribution modelling (2015, background): “The rest-frame colors of AGN hosts (Aird et al. 2012; Georgakakis et al. 2014; Azadi et al. 2014) or their position on the color–magnitude diagram (e.g. Sánchez et al. 2004; Nandra et al. 2007; Schawinski et al. 2009) indicate that they are scattered at the red sequence of passive galaxies, the…”
Clustering of intermediate redshift quasars using the final SDSS III-BOSS sample (2015, background): “…and theoretical standpoints in previous studies (e.g., Hopkins & Hernquist 2009; Kauffmann & Heckman 2009; Novak, Ostriker & Ciotti 2011; Aird et al. 2012; Bongiorno et al. 2012; Gabor & Bournaud 2013; Hickox et al. 2014; Veale, White & Conroy 2014; Schawinski et al. 2015), which…”
The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, methodology): “A second comparison we perform is with the distribution of specific BH accretion rate, i.e. BH accretion rate relative to the stellar mass of the host galaxy, as defined by Aird et al. (2012) and Bongiorno et al. (2012): specific BHAR = Lbol 1038 erg s−1 ( 0.002Mgal M )−1 .”
Project Overview of the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey (2017, methodology): “…sample will allow us to study AGN clustering as a function of redshift which provides strong tests to the model of AGN evolution and black hole/galaxy co-evolution and to study how the overall SED of AGN correlate with redshift, luminosity, host galaxy properties and environment (Aird et al. 2012).”
Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “Previous observations have suggested that the AGN fraction (above some particular threshold in AGN luminosity) rises steeply as a function of stellar mass (e.g., Xue et al. 2010; Aird et al. 2012; Bongiorno et al. 2012; Mullaney et al. 2012).”
Accreting supermassive black holes in the COSMOS field and the connection to their host galaxies (2012, background): “(10) Compared to the values found by Aird et al. (2012), we find a steeper slope for the power-law index (≈1 rather than ≈0.7).”
Morphologies of z ∼ 0.7 AGN host galaxies in CANDELS: no trend of merger incidence with AGN luminosity (2014, background): “This is mostly an effect of detection probability since low-mass galaxies have lower mass black holes which makes detection at equal Eddington rate less likely (Aird et al. 2012).”
A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN. (2015, methodology): “This model uses the observed redshift dependent stellar mass function (SMF) of galaxies (from Moustakas et al. 2013) in combination with the probability function of a galaxy of a given stellar mass and redshift hosting an AGN, based on measurements in Aird et al. (2012) for z 1.”
The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe (2014, background): “The most detailed investigation of the dependence of AGN properties on the mass of the host galaxy was undertaken by Aird et al. (2012) for a population of X-ray detected objects over the range z = 0.2 to 1.0.”
BLACK HOLE VARIABILITY AND THE STAR FORMATION–ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS CONNECTION: DO ALL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES HOST AN ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS? (2013, methodology): “…al. 2009; Starikova et al. 2011; Allevato et al. 2011; Cappelluti et al. 2012), and the corresponding existence of relatively powerful AGNs in massive but passive systems (as discussed in § 4.2) are likely a direct consequence of the Eddington limit (e.g., Hopkins et al. 2009; Aird et al. 2012).”
Cosmic X-ray surveys of distant active galaxies (2015, methodology): “…of galaxies hosting AGN activity above a fixed X-ray luminosity threshold rises steeply with host-galaxy mass out to at least z ≈ 2–3 (e.g., Bundy et al 2008; Brusa et al 2009b; Xue et al 2010; Georgakakis et al 2011; Bluck et al 2011; Aird et al 2012; Bongiorno et al 2012; Mullaney et al 2012b).”
MAJOR GALAXY MERGERS ONLY TRIGGER THE MOST LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2012, background): “In contrast, the distribution of AGN luminosities is independent of stellar mass (Aird et al. 2012).”
Enhanced star formation rates in AGN hosts with respect to inactive galaxies from PEP-Herschel observations (2012, background): “It has been shown, however, that this tendency is strongly influenced by varying mass-to-light ratios and disappears when studying colours of mass-selected samples (Silverman et al. 2009a; Xue et al. 2010) or even revertsto a preference for blue cloud/green valley hosts (Aird et al. 2012).”