A semi-analytic model for the co-evolution of galaxies, black holes and active galactic nuclei

By R. Somerville, P. Hopkins, Thomas J. Cox, Brant Robertson, L. Hernquist. 2008

938 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new semi-analytic model that self-consistently traces the growth of supermassive black holes (BH) and their host galaxies within the context of the Lambda cold dark matter (� CDM) cosmological framework. In our model, the energy emitted by accreting black holes regulates the growth of the black holes themselves, drives galactic scale winds that can remove cold gas from galaxies, and produces powerful jets that heat the hot gas atmospheres surrounding groups and clusters. We present a comprehensive comparison of our model predictions with observational measurements of key physical properties of low-redshift galaxies, such as cold gas fractions, stellar metallicities and ages, and specific star formation rates. We find that our new models successfully reproduce the exponential cut-off in the stellar mass function and the stellar and cold gas mass densities at z ∼ 0, and predict that star formation should be largely, but not entirely, quenched in massive galaxies at the present day. We also find that our model of self-regulated BH growth naturally reproduces the observed relation between BH mass and bulge mass. We explore the global formation history of galaxies and black holes in our models, presenting predictions for the cosmic histories of star formation, stellar mass assembly, cold gas and metals. We find that models assuming the ‘concordance’ � CDM cosmology overproduce star formation and stellar mass at high redshift (z 2). A model with less small-scale power predicts less star formation at high redshift, and excellent agreement with the observed stellar mass assembly history, but may have difficulty accounting for the cold gas in quasar absorption systems at high redshift (z ∼ 3–4).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e26580e2abd3074e177bc53a29dab6ed0321b7b8

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Dav'e
4. Volker Springel
5. R. Somerville
6. A. Dekel
7. T. Naab
8. C. Conroy

In Instrumentation

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Dav'e
4. R. Somerville
5. Volker Springel
6. C. Conroy
7. A. Dekel
8. Thomas J. Cox

Citations in the corpus

• Integral field spectroscopy with SINFONI of VVDS galaxies I. Galaxy dynamics and mass assembly at 1.2 < z < 1.6 (2009, background): “In addition, the effect of the competing processes of cooling, angular momentum exchange, feedback from star formation and AGNs, or gas accretion, are to be further investigated (Somerville et al. 2008).”
• ON THE COSMIC EVOLUTION OF THE SCALING RELATIONS BETWEEN BLACK HOLES AND THEIR HOST GALAXIES: BROAD-LINE ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI IN THE zCOSMOS SURVEY (2009, background): “…2000; Volonteri et al. 2003; Granato et al. 2004; Menci et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Bower et al. 2006; Malbon et al. 2007; Marulli et al. 2008; Somerville et al. 2008), and, among other things, have helped establishing the importance of late-time feedback from radio-active AGN for the…”
• Fitting the integrated spectral energy distributions of galaxies (2010, methodology): “Thus to trace the formation of galaxies within the forming dark matter halos semi-analytic models (SAMs) are used (e.g. Cole et al. 2000; Kauffmann and Haehnelt 2000; Hatton et al. 2003; De Lucia et al. 2004; Somerville et al. 2008).”
• Galaxies–intergalactic medium interaction calculation – I. Galaxy formation as a function of large-scale environment (2009, neutral): “In semianalytic models of galaxy formation (Bower et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Somerville et al. 2008) and cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (Di Matteo et al. 2008; Sijacki et al. 2008; Booth & Schaye 2009), this is achieved by invoking feedback from AGN, which is not modelled in our…”
• Galactic star formation and accretion histories from matching galaxies to dark matter haloes (2012, background): “…star formation efficiency may be lowered by feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN Springel et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2006; Bower et al. 2006; Somerville et al. 2008; Hambrick et al. 2011; Teyssier et al. 2011; Martizzi et al. 2012; Puchwein & Springel 2012) which can heat the gas in the…”
• Impact of supermassive black hole growth on star formation (2017, background): “of halo mass for three different runs of a simulation[6] and for”
• OBSCURATION-DEPENDENT EVOLUTION OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2015, background): “Most black hole formation models include an early stage of gas inflows caused by mergers (e.g. Hopkins et al. 2006a; Somerville et al. 2008) or secular processes (e.g. Fanidakis et al. 2012; Bournaud et al. 2007; Ciotti & Ostriker 1997, 2001).”
• WHAT DOES A SUBMILLIMETER GALAXY SELECTION ACTUALLY SELECT? THE DEPENDENCE OF SUBMILLIMETER FLUX DENSITY ON STAR FORMATION RATE AND DUST MASS (2010, methodology): “In previous work, we developed a model relating the evolution of galaxies, starbursts, and quasars (Hopkins et al. 2006b, 2006a, 2008a, 2009d; Somerville et al. 2008).”
• THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIONS, BARS, BULGES, AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI ON STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN LOCAL MASSIVE GALAXIES (2012, background): “…& Rix 2004; Magorrian et al. 1998; Merloni et al. 2010; Beifiori et al. 2012), AGN feedback as an important quenching mechanism is appealing (e.g. Somerville et al. 2008), as it would explain why few galaxies without central mass concentration are quenched, while a very large fraction of the…”
• First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: matter and galaxy clustering (2017, background): “…matching a large variety of observational data, both at the present epoch and at high redshift (e.g. Kauffmann, White & Guiderdoni 1993; De Lucia et al. 2006; Somerville et al. 2008; Benson 2012; Clay et al. 2015; Henriques et al. 2015; Croton et al. 2016; Lacey et al. 2016; Cattaneo et al. 2017).”
• The current status of galaxy formation (2012, background): “SAMs indeed demonstrate that AGN feedback is able to quench star formation in massive elliptical galaxies (Croton et al., 2006; Bower et al., 2006; Cattaneo et al., 2006; Somerville et al., 2008).”
• LSD: Lyman-break galaxies Stellar populations and Dynamics – I. Mass, metallicity and gas at z∼ 3.1 (2009, methodology): “The relation between stellar mass and gas fraction in local galaxies is often used to constrain the models of galaxy formation (e.g. Somerville et al. 2008).”
• Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “Concurrent BH growth and the rapid production of new stars (e.g., Somerville et al. 2008; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2013) can naturally give rise to known correlations between the BH mass and galaxy properties, such as the bulge mass and stellar velocity dispersion (e.g., Magorrian et al. 1998;…”
• MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics (2016, background): “Hence an additional “maintenance mode” source of energetic feedback is required to fully quench massive galaxies (e.g. Croton et al. 2006; Somerville et al. 2008).”
• Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, background): “Semi-analytical models, thanks to their higher flexibility in physics modelling and significantly lower computational cost, have targeted an ambitious goal: reproducing, in a statistical sense, all available observations of galaxies (Guo et al. 2011; Somerville et al. 2008, 2012).”
• Cosmic evolution of the atomic and molecular gas contents of galaxies (2011, methodology): “Until recently, the ISM of galaxies in semi-analytic models was treated as a single star-forming phase (e.g. Cole et a. 2000; Springel et al. 2001; Cattaneo et al. 2008; Lagos et al.2008; Somerville et al. 2008).”
• The mass evolution of the first galaxies: stellar mass functions and star formation rates at 4 < z < 7 in the CANDELS GOODS-South field (2014, methodology): “…2015 http://m nras.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from The mass evolution of the first galaxies 2965 solely by photometric scatter, we performed a range of tests on a mock catalogue generated from the semi-analytic models (SAM) described in Somerville et al. (2008) and Somerville et al. (2012).”