Related papers: Why are AGN found in High Mass Galaxies?
For over 60 years, the scientific community has studied actively growing central super-massive black holes (active galactic nuclei -- AGN) but fundamental questions on their genesis remain unanswered. Numerical simulations and theoretical…
We review theoretical and observational arguments favoring a scenario in which a typical massive black hole (MBH) is formed in the merger core of colliding disk systems at high z during the build-up of a spheroid. Low-mass (~ 10^{5-6}…
Recent surveys suggest that most or all normal galaxies host a massive black hole with 1/100 to 1/1000 of the visible mass of the spheroid of the galaxy. Various lines of argument suggest that these galaxies have merged at least once in our…
We use hydrodynamical simulations to study the color transformations induced by star formation and active galactic nuclei (AGN) during major mergers of spiral galaxies. Our modeling accounts for radiative cooling, star formation, and…
The growth of supermassive black holes appears to be driven by galaxy mergers, violent merger-free processes and/or `secular' processes. In order to quantify the effects of secular evolution on black hole growth, we study a sample of active…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
We investigate the connection between galaxy--galaxy mergers and enhanced black hole (BH) growth using the cosmological hydrodynamical EAGLE simulation. We do this via three methods of analysis, investigating: the merger fraction of AGN,…
We assess models for the assembly of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies that trace their hierarchical build-up far up in the dark halo `merger tree'. We assume that the first `seed' black holes (BHs) formed in…
The presence of dual active galactic nuclei (AGN) on scales of a few tens of kpc can be used to study merger-induced accretion on supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and offer insights about SMBH mergers, using dual AGNs as merger precursors.…
The deep connection between galaxies and their supermassive black holes is central to modern astrophysics and cosmology. The observed correlation between galaxy and black hole mass is usually attributed to the contribution of major mergers…
The dense and gaseous environments of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can catalyze repeated mergers of stellar-mass black holes (BHs), potentially explaining the high-mass tail of binary black hole (BBH) mergers observed by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA…
The heaviest neutron stars and lightest black holes expected to be produced by stellar evolution leave the mass-range $2.2$ M$_{\odot}\lesssim m \lesssim 5$ M$_\odot$ largely unpopulated. Objects found in this so-called lower mass gap…
Research over the past decade has shown diminishing empirical evidence for major galaxy mergers being a dominating or even important mechanism for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies and the triggering of optically or X-ray…
Observations of distant bright quasars suggest that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Models in which light black hole seeds form by the collapse of…
The detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes with masses $\sim\,80-150\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ suggests that some proportion of black hole binary systems form hierarchically in dense astrophysical environments, as most stellar…
We investigate the connection between supermassive black holes (SMBHs), their host galaxies, and large-scale dark-matter halos using broad-line X-ray AGN from the XMM--XXL and Stripe\,82X surveys, together with galaxies from VIPERS and…
Recent observations support the idea that nuclear black holes grew by gas accretion while shining as luminous quasars at high redshift, and they establish a relation of the black hole mass with the host galaxy's spheroidal stellar system.…
The occurrence of dual active galactic nuclei (AGN) on scales of a few tens of kpc can be used to study merger-induced accretion on massive black holes (MBHs) and to derive clues on MBH mergers, using dual AGN as a parent population of…
The majority of massive stars are found in close binaries which: (i) are prone to merge and (ii) are accompanied by another distant tertiary star (triples). Here, we study the evolution of the stellar post-merger binaries composed of the…
Hierarchical models of galaxy formation predict that galaxy mergers represent a significant transitional stage of rapid supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth. Yet, the connection between the merging process and enhanced active galactic…