Luminous and obscured quasars and their host galaxies
Abstract
The most heavily-obscured, luminous quasars might represent a specific phase of the evolution of actively accreting supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, possibly related to mergers. We investigated a sample of the most luminous quasars at in the GOODS fields, selected in the mid-infrared band through detailed spectral energy distribution (SED) decomposition. The vast majority of these quasars (~80%) are obscured in the X-ray band and ~30% of them to such an extent, that they are undetected in some of the deepest (2 and 4 Ms) Chandra X-ray data. Although no clear relation is found between the star-formation rate of the host galaxies and the X-ray obscuration, we find a higher incidence of heavily-obscured quasars in disturbed/merging galaxies compared to the unobscured ones, thus possibly representing an earlier stage of evolution, after which the system is relaxing and becoming unobscured.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1712.07250,
title = {Luminous and obscured quasars and their host galaxies},
author = {Agnese Del Moro and David M. Alexander and Franz E. Bauer and Emanuele Daddi and Dale D. Kocevski and Flora Stanley and Daniel H. McIntosh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.07250},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures. Proceeding of "Quasars at all cosmic epochs", Padova April 2017. Accepted for publication in Front. Astron. Space Sci.; M. D'Onofrio, D. Dultzin, A. Del Olmo, P. Marziani, eds