Abstract
By exploring more than sixty thousand quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5, Steinhardt & Elvis discovered a sub-Eddington boundary and a redshift-dependent drop-off at higher black hole mass, possible clues to the growth history of massive black holes. Our contribution to this special issue of Universe amounts to an application of a model for black hole accretion and jet formation to these observations. For illustrative purposes, we include ~100,000 data points from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 where the sub-Eddington boundary is also visible and propose a theoretical picture that explains these features. By appealing to thin disk theory and both the lower accretion efficiency and the time evolution of jetted quasars compared to non-jetted quasars in our “gap paradigm”, we explain two features of the sub-Eddington boundary. First, we show that a drop-off on the quasar mass-luminosity plane for larger black hole mass occurs at all redshifts. But the fraction of jetted quasars is directly related to the merger function in this paradigm, which means the jetted quasar fraction drops with decrease in redshift, which allows us to explain a second feature of the sub-Eddington boundary, namely a redshift dependence of the slope of the quasar mass–luminosity boundary at high black hole mass stemming from a change in radiative efficiency with time. We are able to reproduce the mass dependence of, as well as the oscillating behavior in, the slope of the sub-Eddington boundary as a function of time. The basic physical idea involves retrograde accretion occurring only for a subset of the more massive black holes, which implies that most spinning black holes in our model are prograde accretors. In short, this paper amounts to a qualitative overview of how a sub-Eddington boundary naturally emerges in the gap paradigm.
Highlights
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) have been found to obey their Eddington luminosity limit, and even supermassive black holes in quiescent galaxies can be actively accreting at rates of ≈0.1% that of Eddington (Peterson 2014)
Our goal is to describe a picture in which the sub-Eddington boundary emerges from a prescription for redshift z~1.5–2 quasar evolution focused on retrograde accreting black holes, which is both difficult to explore (e.g., [8]) and where a variety of processes appear to be at work (e.g., [9]), by applying the same ideas that allowed the model to shed light on the high redshift AGN phenomenon ([10,11])
In order to construct a redshift dependence in the slope, we must determine from theory the redshift dependence of the average luminosity at high black hole mass, which in turn requires that we evaluate how retrograde black hole formation depends on time
Summary
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) have been found to obey their Eddington luminosity limit, and even supermassive black holes in quiescent galaxies can be actively accreting at rates of ≈0.1% that of Eddington (Peterson 2014). Building on the work of [1] showing that black holes grow predominantly by accreting close to their Eddington limit, [2] explored the quasar mass-luminosity plane for 62,185 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and discovered an additional surprising and as yet unexplained ‘Sub-Eddington Boundary’ (see [1] Figure 6 including objects at higher redshift where the sub-Eddington boundary appears) Understanding this behavior promises to light of onthe the off”
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