What drives the growth of black holes

By D. M. Alexander, R. Hickox. 2011

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Massive black holes (BHs) are at once exotic and yet ubiquitous, residing in the centers of massive galaxies in the local Universe. Recent years have seen remarkable advances in our understanding of how these BHs form and grow over cosmic time, during which they are revealed as active galactic nuclei (AGN). However, despite decades of research, we still lack a coherent picture of the physical drivers of BH growth, the connection between the growth of BHs and their host galaxies, the role of large-scale environment on the fueling of BHs, and the impact of BH-driven outflows on the growth of galaxies. In this paper we review our progress in addressing these key issues, motivated by the science presented at the “What Drives the Growth of Black Holes?” workshop held at Durham on 26 th ‐29 th July 2010, and discuss how these questions may be tackled with current and future facilities.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff7e61b4d363686c88c714547175da951a125dd1

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmic X-ray surveys of distant active galaxies (2015, background): “…AGN activity and star formation by considering whether AGNs have significant impact on the star formation in the host galaxy (e.g., by driving energetic winds, outflows, and jets, commonly referred to as “AGN feedback”; see Veilleux et al 2005; Alexander and Hickox 2012; Fabian 2012 for reviews).”
A CORRELATION BETWEEN STAR FORMATION RATE AND AVERAGE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION IN STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2013, background): “…also drive the growth of SMBHs, or whether SMBH growth would scale similarly with galactic star formation in different SF modes, since the dynamical scales of the gas inflows that induce galactic star formation and SMBH accretion are vastly different (see Alexander & Hickox 2012, for a review).”
The Illustris simulation: the evolving population of black holes across cosmic time (2014, background): “…e.g. Lutz et al. 2008; Rosario et al. 2012) and Hickox et al. (2014) discussed the possibility that while star formation and black hole activity are correlated over long timescales, AGN variability introduces a significant scatter (see also discussion in Alexander & Hickox 2012; Azadi et al. 2014).”
THE CHANDRA COSMOS LEGACY SURVEY: OPTICAL/IR IDENTIFICATIONS (2015, background): “However, even if this common growth seems securely established, the causes of this trend remain largely not understood (e.g. Merloni & Heinz 2008; Alexander & Hickox 2012).”
A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN. (2015, background): “However, the scales of AGN activity and star formation are very different, which has lead to suggestions that any tight connection between them must be due to one process regulating the other (see Alexander & Hickox 2012; Fabian 2012; Kormendy & Ho 2013 for recent reviews).”
X-shooter reveals powerful outflows in z ∼ 1.5 X-ray selected obscured quasi-stellar objects (2014, background): “…survey has the combination of area and depth necessary to sample with the adequate statistics rare objects (such as those expected in the ‘feedback’ phase discussed above) otherwise missed in pencil-beam surveys such as the Chandra Deep Fields (see e.g. Alexander & Hickox 2012 for a review).”
The bolometric quasar luminosity function at z = 0–7 (2020, background): “Furthermore, observations have demonstrated that galaxies and SMBHs co-evolve (see reviews of Alexander & Hickox 2012; Fabian 2012; Kormendy & Ho 2013; Heckman & Best 2014, and references therein).”
Kiloparsec-scale outflows are prevalent among luminous AGN: outflows and feedback in the context of the overall AGN population (2014, background): “Placing observational constraints on how AGN activity couples to the gas in galaxies and halos, and where these processes are most prevalent, is an important area of ongoing research (for reviews see: Cattaneo et al. 2009; Alexander & Hickox 2012; Fabian 2012; McNamara & Nulsen 2012).”
Impact of supermassive black hole growth on star formation (2017, background): “It is not the purpose of this review to comprehensively cover the huge amount of observational work on outflows or jets driven by radiative AGN (see [41, 42, 35, 12]).”
AN ALMA SURVEY OF SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES IN THE EXTENDED CHANDRA DEEP FIELD SOUTH: THE REDSHIFT DISTRIBUTION AND EVOLUTION OF SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES (2013, methodology): “If we assume the SMG lifetime is ∼ 100 Myr, and that we are seeing each SMG on average half-way through the burst, then following Eqn 10 from Alexander & Hickox (2012), and assuming η = 0.2, the SMBH will have grown by ∼ 20 per cent at the end of the SMG phase.”
The SRG/eROSITA all-sky survey (2024, unknown): “…of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that sit at the centres of galaxies and which may strongly influence their formation and subsequent evolution (Brandt & Hasinger 2005; Hopkins et al. 2008; Hickox et al. 2009; Fabian 2012; Alexander & Hickox 2012; Kormendy & Ho 2013; Brandt & Alexander 2015).”
UNCOVER: The Growth of the First Massive Black Holes from JWST/NIRSpec—Spectroscopic Redshift Confirmation of an X-Ray Luminous AGN at z = 10.1 (2023, background): “Moreover, such objects are not entirely uncommon in the nearby Universe (e.g., NGC 1448; NGC 4945; see Alexander & Hickox 2012; Annuar et al. 2017) as even luminous AGN signatures can be swamped by strong star formation and/or extreme obscuration.”