Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Participants
- Preface
- Black holes, entropy, and information
- Gravitational waves from black-hole mergers
- Out-of-this-world physics: Black holes at future colliders
- Black holes in globular clusters
- Evolution of massive black holes
- Supermassive black holes in deep multiwavelength surveys
- Black-hole masses from reverberation mapping
- Black-hole masses from gas dynamics
- Evolution of supermassive black holes
- Black-hole masses of distant quasars
- The accretion history of supermassive black holes
- Strong field gravity and spin of black holes from broad iron lines
- Birth of massive black-hole binaries
- Dynamics around supermassive black holes
- Black-hole formation and growth: Simulations in general relativity
- Estimating the spins of stellar-mass black holes
- Stellar relaxation processes near the Galactic massive black hole
- Tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes
- Where to look for radiatively inefficient accrection flows in low-luminosity AGN
- Making black holes visible: Accretion, radiation, and jets
The accretion history of supermassive black holes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Participants
- Preface
- Black holes, entropy, and information
- Gravitational waves from black-hole mergers
- Out-of-this-world physics: Black holes at future colliders
- Black holes in globular clusters
- Evolution of massive black holes
- Supermassive black holes in deep multiwavelength surveys
- Black-hole masses from reverberation mapping
- Black-hole masses from gas dynamics
- Evolution of supermassive black holes
- Black-hole masses of distant quasars
- The accretion history of supermassive black holes
- Strong field gravity and spin of black holes from broad iron lines
- Birth of massive black-hole binaries
- Dynamics around supermassive black holes
- Black-hole formation and growth: Simulations in general relativity
- Estimating the spins of stellar-mass black holes
- Stellar relaxation processes near the Galactic massive black hole
- Tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes
- Where to look for radiatively inefficient accrection flows in low-luminosity AGN
- Making black holes visible: Accretion, radiation, and jets
Summary
How did the mass of 108−1010M⊙ super-massive black holes at the center of massive galaxies in the local Universe build up? Did the bulk of the growth happen in an optically luminous AGN phase? Or did a substantial fraction of SMBH growth occur in a dusty, obscured phase, visible as a luminous infrared galaxy? Has there been substantial SMBH growth in a low luminosity or radiatively inefficient regime after the more luminous AGN phase? These are particularly important questions, given the tight relationship between the mass of galaxy bulges and their SMBHs, suggesting that the formation and evolution of galaxies and SMBHs are intimately linked. We use the multi-wavelength data in the NDWFS Boötes field to address this issue. We have performed an x-ray stacking analysis of ~20,000 red galaxies at z = 0.2−1 to show that the average nuclear accretion rates in these sources are low and decreasing with time. Given the long timescale, significant SMBH mass growth could occur in this regime. We also investigate the nature of an extreme, obscured population of AGN-dominated luminous infrared galaxies which are likely to host SMBHs undergoing a period of rapid and substantial growth.
Introduction
In the present day Universe, most (if not all) massive galaxies contain super-massive black holes (SMBHs). How did the mass of these SMBHs grow as a function of time? The correlation between the mass of SMBHs and the galaxy bulge in which they reside (Magorrian et al. 1998; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000) suggests that the processes which govern the build up of galaxies and SMBHs are related.
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- Information
- Black Holes , pp. 173 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011