Related papers: Major Galaxy Mergers Only Trigger the Most Luminou…
We analyze the morphological properties of a large sample of 1503 70 micron selected galaxies in the COSMOS field spanning the redshift range 0.01<z< 3.5 with a median redshift of 0.5 and an infrared luminosity range of 10^8<L_IR<10^14L_sun…
We examine the hypothesis that mergers and close encounters between galaxies can fuel AGNs by increasing the rate at which gas accretes towards the central black hole. We compare the clustering of galaxies around radio-loud AGNs with the…
Galaxy mergers have been shown to trigger AGN in the nearby universe, but the timescale over which this process happens remains unconstrained. The Multi-Model Merger Identifier (MUMMI) machine vision pipeline has been demonstrated to…
Offset active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are AGNs that are in ongoing galaxy mergers, which produce kinematic offsets in the AGNs relative to their host galaxies. Offset AGNs are also close relatives of dual AGNs. We conduct a systematic search…
Two effects have substantially increased the scatter in the AGN black hole mass - host galaxy bulge luminosity relationship derived from SDSS spectra. The first is that at a fixed black hole mass, the SDSS spectrum depends strongly on…
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…
We calculate the projected two point correlation function for samples of luminous and massive galaxies in the COMBO-17 photometric redshift survey, focusing particularly on the amplitude of the correlation function at small projected radii…
We consider simple semi-analytic models that relate the active galactic nuclei (AGN) evolution to the merging history of their host dark matter haloes and quantify their ability of matching the AGN luminosity function and its spatial…
We measure the merger fraction of massive galaxies using the UltraVISTA/COSMOS $Ks$-band selected catalog, complemented with the deeper, higher resolution 3DHST+CANDELS catalog selected in the HST/WFC3 $H$-band, presenting the largest…
The origin of merging binary black holes detected through gravitational waves remains a fundamental question in astrophysics. While stellar evolution imposes an upper mass limit of about 50 solar mass for black holes, some observed…
[Abridged] To investigate the evolution in the relation between galaxy stellar and central black hole mass we construct a volume limited complete sample of 85 AGN with host galaxy stellar masses M_{*} > 10^{10.5} M_{sol}, and specific X-ray…
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…
To facilitate new studies of galaxy merger driven fueling of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), we present a catalog of 387 AGNs that we have identified in the final population of over $10,000$ $z<0.15$ galaxies observed by the SDSS-IV integral…
Advanced LIGO \& Advanced Virgo are detecting a large number of binary stellar origin black hole (BH) mergers. A promising channel for accelerated BH merger lies in active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks of gas around super-masssive black…
We compute black hole masses and bolometric luminosities for 57 active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the redshift range 1.25 < z < 2.67, selected from the GOODS-South deep multi-wavelength survey field via their X-ray emission. We determine host…
Theoretical considerations and observational data support the idea that mergers were more frequent in the past. At redshifts z = 2 to 5, violent interactions and mergers may be implicated by observations of Lyman-break galaxies, sub-mm…
Despite observed strong correlations between central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and star-formation in galactic nuclei, uncertainties exist in our understanding of their coupling. We present observations of the ratio of…
Several recent observations suggest that gas-poor (dissipationless) mergers of elliptical galaxies contribute significantly to the build-up of the massive end of the red sequence. We perform a series of major merger simulations to…
The morphology of galaxies reflects their assembly history and ongoing dynamical perturbations from the environment. Analyzing i-band images from the Pan-STARRS1 Survey, we study the optical morphological asymmetry of the host galaxies of a…
Observations and theoretical simulations suggest that a significant fraction of merger-triggered accretion onto supermassive black holes is highly obscured, particularly in late-stage galaxy mergers, when the black hole is expected to grow…