Related papers: Why are AGN found in High Mass Galaxies?
The ubiquity of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of nearby luminous galaxies can arise from the multiple mergers experienced by dark matter halos in hierarchical structure formation models, even if only a small fraction of…
We study the statistics and cosmic evolution of massive black hole seeds formed during major mergers of gas-rich late-type galaxies. Generalizing the results of the hydro-simulations from Mayer et al. 2010, we envision a scenario in which a…
The origins of the stellar-mass black hole mergers discovered by LIGO/Virgo are still unknown. Here we show that, if migration traps develop in the \add{accretion} disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) and promote the mergers of their…
We examine the relationship between galaxies, supermassive black holes and AGN using a sample of 22,000 narrow-emission-line AGN drawn from a a sample of 122,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We have studied how AGN host…
Models of galaxy formation invoke the major merger of gas-rich progenitor galaxies as the trigger for significant phases of black hole growth and the associated feedback that suppresses star formation to create red spheroidal remnants.…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are a ubiquitous component of the nuclei of galaxies. It is normally assumed that, following the merger of two massive galaxies, a SMBH binary will form, shrink due to stellar or gas dynamical processes and…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have been detected in the centers of most nearby massive galaxies. Galaxies today are the products of billions of years of galaxy mergers, but also billions of years of SMBH activity as active galactic…
Collisions and interactions between gas-rich galaxies are thought to be pivotal stages in their formation and evolution, causing the rapid production of new stars, and possibly serving as a mechanism for fueling supermassive black holes…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are common in local galactic nuclei, and SMBHs as massive as several billion solar masses already exist at redshift z=6. These earliest SMBHs may grow by the combination of radiation-pressure-limited…
What is the relevance of major mergers and interactions as triggering mechanisms for active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity? To answer this longstanding question, we analyze 140 XMM-selected AGN host galaxies and a matched control sample of…
The large-scale environments of active galactic nuclei (AGN) reveal important information on the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Previous AGN clustering measurements using 2-point correlation functions have hinted…
Using multiwavelength surveys of active galactic nuclei across a wide range of bolometric luminosities (10^{43}<L_{bol}(erg/s<5x10^{46}) and redshifts (0<z<3), we find a strong, redshift-independent correlation between the AGN luminosity…
We incorporate a simple scheme for the growth of supermassive black holes into semi-analytic models that follow the formation and evolution of galaxies in a cold dark matter dominated Universe. We assume that supermassive black holes are…
Detecting the seed black holes from which quasars formed is extremely challenging; however, those seeds that did not grow into supermassive should be found as intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) of 100-10$^5$ M$_{\odot}$ in local dwarf…
Active galactic nucleus (AGN) growth in disk-dominated, merger-free galaxies is poorly understood, largely due to the difficulty in disentangling the AGN emission from that of the host galaxy. By carefully separating this emission, we…
Recent observational and theoretical studies have suggested that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grow mostly through non-merger (`secular') processes. Since galaxy mergers lead to dynamical bulge growth, the only way to observationally…
LIGO/Virgo has detected several binary black hole (BBH) merger events that may have originated in the accretion disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). These events require individual black hole masses that fall within the pair instability…
We investigate the possibility that present-day galaxies and their dark matter haloes contain a population of massive black holes (MBHs) that form by hierarchical merging of the black hole remnants of the first stars in the Universe. Some…
At low redshift, massive black holes are found in the centers of almost all large elliptical galaxies, and also in many lower-mass systems. Their evolution is believed to be inextricably entangled with that of their host galaxies. On the…
The empirical relationship between the broad line region size and the source luminosity in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is used to obtain black holes (BH) masses for a large number of quasars in three samples. The largests BH masses found…