Abstract
ABSTRACT The co-evolution between central supermassive black holes (BHs), their host galaxies, and dark matter haloes is still a matter of intense debate. Present theoretical models suffer from large uncertainties and degeneracies, for example, between the fraction of accreting sources and their characteristic accretion rate. In recent work, we showed that active galactic nuclei (AGNs) clustering represents a powerful tool to break degeneracies when analysed in terms of mean BH mass, and that AGN bias at fixed stellar mass is largely independent of most of the input parameters, such as the AGN duty cycle and the mean scaling between BH mass and host galaxy stellar mass. In this paper, we take advantage of our improved semi-empirical methodology and recent clustering data derived from large AGN samples at z ∼ 1.2, demonstrate that the AGN bias as a function of host galaxy stellar mass is a crucial diagnostic of the BH–galaxy connection, and is highly dependent on the scatter around the BH mass–galaxy mass scaling relation and on the relative fraction of satellite and central active BHs. Current data at z ∼ 1.2 favour relatively high values of AGN in satellites, pointing to a major role of disc instabilities in triggering AGN, unless a high minimum host halo mass is assumed. The data are not decisive on the magnitude/covariance of the BH–galaxy scatter at z ∼ 1.2 and intermediate host masses $M_\mathrm{star} \lesssim 10^{11} \, \mathrm{M}_\mathrm{star}$. However, future surveys like Euclid/LSST will be pivotal in shedding light on the BH–galaxy co-evolution.
Highlights
The presence of supermassive black holes (BHs) at the centers of virtually every massive galaxy is an accepted paradigm
Expand on Allevato et al (2021) by following their methodology to create realistic mock catalogues of galaxies and active BHs and (i) we include on top of a regular Gaussian scatter a positive covariant correlation between the BH and the host galaxy stellar mass at fixed halo mass; (ii) we focus on redshift ∼ 1.2, i.e. close to the peak of the active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity (e.g. Shankar, Weinberg & Miralda-Escude 2009a; Madau & Dickinson 2014); and (iii) we allow the satellite AGN fraction to vary
Building on previous work from our group and by making use of advanced and diverse semi-empirical routines, inclusive of the covariance among some input parameters, we here show that: (i) The overall shape and normalization of the large-scale bias as a function of AGN host galaxy stellar mass b(Mstar), is largely independent of the input stellar mass–halo mass relation, duty cycle, and Eddington ratio distribution, while it is mostly driven by the dispersion in – not so much by the shape of – the input stellar mass– BH mass relation
Summary
The presence of supermassive black holes (BHs) at the centers of virtually every massive galaxy is an accepted paradigm. The masses of these central BHs appear to correlate with the properties of their host galaxies Ferrarese & Ford 2005; Kormendy & Ho 2013; Graham & Scott 2015; Reines & Volonteri 2015; Shankar et al 2019, 2020) with tentative evidence for a link even with their host dark matter (DM) haloes The very existence of such correlations, which are observed to hold even at higher redshifts (e.g. Shankar, Bernardi & Haiman 2009b; Cisternas et al 2011b; Shen et al 2015; Suh et al 2020), point to a degree of co-evolution between the BHs and their hosts. A strong release of energy/momentum from an accreting central supermassive BH shining as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) naturally predicts a tight
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