English

AGN evolution from galaxy evolution viewpoint - II

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-11-28 v1

Abstract

In order to relate the observed evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function and the luminosity function of active galactic nuclei (AGN), we explore a co-evolution scenario in which AGN are associated only with the very last phases of the star-forming life of a galaxy. We derive analytically the connections between the parameters of the observed quasar luminosity functions and galaxy mass functions. The (mbh/m)Qing(m_{\rm bh}/m_{*})_{Qing} associated with quenching is given by the ratio of the global black hole accretion rate density (BHARD) and star-formation rate density (SFRD) at the epoch in question. Observational data on the SFRD and BHARD suggests (mbh/m)Qing(1+z)1.5(m_{\rm bh}/m_{*})_{Qing} \propto (1+z)^{1.5} below redshift 2. This evolution reproduces the observed mass-luminosity plane of SDSS quasars, and also reproduces the local mbh/mm_{\rm bh}/m_{*} relation in passive galaxies. The characteristic Eddington ratio, λ\lambda^*, is derived from both the BHARD/SFRD ratio and the evolving LL^* of the AGN population. This increases up to z2z \sim 2 as λ(1+z)2.5\lambda^* \propto (1+z)^{2.5} but at higher redshifts, λ\lambda^* stabilizes at the physically interesting Eddington limit, λ1\lambda^* \sim 1. The new model may be thought of as an opposite extreme to our earlier co-evolution scenario in Caplar et al. 2015. The main observable difference between the two co-evolution scenarios, presented here and in Caplar et al. 2015, is in the active fraction of low mass star-forming galaxies. We compare the predictions with the data from deep multi-wavelength surveys and find that the "quenching" scenario developed in the current paper is much to be preferred.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.04170,
  title  = {AGN evolution from galaxy evolution viewpoint - II},
  author = {Neven Caplar and Simon J. Lilly and Benny Trakhtenbrot},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04170},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

28 pages, 14 figures, accepted by ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:33:55.248Z