Tracing the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes to z ∼ 3 with Herschel

By I. Delvecchio, C. Gruppioni, Francesca Pozzi, S. Berta, G. Zamorani, A. Cimatti, D. Lutz, D. Scott, C. Vignali, G. Cresci and 16 more. 2014

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study a sample of Herschel selected galaxies within the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-South and the Cosmic Evolution Survey fields in the framework of the Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) Evolutionary Probe project. Starting from the rich multiwavelength photometric data sets available in both fields, we perform a broad-band spectral energy distribution decomposition to disentangle the possible active galactic nucleus (AGN) contribution from that related to the host galaxy. We find that 37 per cent of the Herschel-selected sample shows signatures of nuclear activity at the 99 per cent confidence level. The probability of revealing AGN activity increases for bright (L_(1−1000) > 10^(11) L_⊙) star-forming galaxies at z > 0.3, becoming about 80 per cent for the brightest (L_(1−1000) > 10^(12) L_⊙) infrared (IR) galaxies at z ≥ 1. Finally, we reconstruct the AGN bolometric luminosity function and the supermassive black hole growth rate across cosmic time up to z ∼ 3 from a far-IR perspective. This work shows general agreement with most of the panchromatic estimates from the literature, with the global black hole growth peaking at z ∼ 2 and reproducing the observed local black hole mass density with consistent values of the radiative efficiency ϵ_(rad) (∼0.07).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea0994c92413d03c000171f783b26c2f22df7155

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmic X-ray surveys of distant active galaxies (2015, methodology): “…AGN bolometric luminosity functions, derived from XLFs via bolometric corrections, to estimate the total amount of cosmic SMBH growth, ρ•,XLF, for comparison to ρ•,loc (e.g., Marconi et al 2004; Shankar 2013; Ueda et al 2014; also see Delvecchio et al 2014 for a recent infrared-based perspective).”
Selection bias in dynamically measured supermassive black hole samples: its consequences and the quest for the most fundamental relation (2016, background): “…shows that black hole accretion and star formation peak at similar epochs (e.g., Marconi et al. 2004; Merloni 2004; Silverman et al. 2008; Zheng et al. 2009; Shankar et al. 2009b; Delvecchio et al. 2014), consistent with the idea that massive black holes and their host galaxies may be co-evolving.”
A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN. (2015, methodology): “This result may initially seem in disagreement with the results of studies such as Rafferty et al. (2011), Mullaney et al. (2012b), Chen et al. (2013), Delvecchio et al. (2014), and Rodighiero et al. (2015), which find a correlation between the average LAGN and SFR of star-forming galaxies.”
Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, methodology): “3.2.1); (4) multiple component SED fitting using sets of galaxy and AGN templates (Berta et al. 2013; Delvecchio et al. 2014, 2017; Calistro et al. 2017) (5) excess of radio luminosity relative to a tracer of the SF rate (SFR) in the host galaxy (e.g. far or total IR luminosity; Condon 1992; Del…”