English

Does black-hole growth depend on the cosmic environment?

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-08-01 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

It is well known that environment affects galaxy evolution, which is broadly related to supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth. We investigate whether SMBH evolution also depends on host-galaxy local (sub-Mpc) and global (110\approx 1-10 Mpc) environment. We construct the surface-density field (local environment) and cosmic web (global environment) in the COSMOS field at z=0.33.0z=0.3-3.0. The environments in COSMOS range from the field to clusters (Mhalo1014 MM_\mathrm{halo} \lesssim 10^{14}\ M_\odot), covering the environments where 99%{\approx 99\%} of galaxies in the Universe reside. We measure sample-averaged SMBH accretion rate (BHAR\overline{\mathrm{BHAR}}) from X-ray observations, and study its dependence on overdensity and cosmic-web environment at different redshifts while controlling for galaxy stellar mass (MM_\star). Our results show that BHAR\overline{\mathrm{BHAR}} does not significantly depend on overdensity or cosmic-web environment once MM_\star is controlled, indicating that environment-related physical mechanisms (e.g. tidal interaction and ram-pressure stripping) might not significantly affect SMBH growth. We find that BHAR\overline{\mathrm{BHAR}} is strongly related to host-galaxy MM_\star, regardless of environment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1807.06013,
  title  = {Does black-hole growth depend on the cosmic environment?},
  author = {Guang Yang and W. N. Brandt and B. Darvish and C. -T. J. Chen and F. Vito and D. M. Alexander and F. E. Bauer and J. R. Trump},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.06013},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

24 pages, 17 figures, 7 tables. Accepted by MNRAS

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