Related papers: On The Dark Side of Quasar Evolution
Quasars are useful tracers of the cosmological evolution of the black hole mass - galaxy relation. We compare the expectations of Semi-Analytical Models (SAM) of galaxy evolution, to the largest available datasets of quasar host galaxies…
The final merger of a pair of massive black holes in a galactic nucleus is compelled by gravitational radiation. Gravitational waves from the mergers of black holes of masses (10^5-10^7)(1+z)^{-1} Msun at redshifts of 1-20 will be readily…
The presence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs, $M_\text{BH}\sim10^9 M_\odot$) at $z>7$ remains a puzzle. While their existence appears to require exotic formation or growth processes, it is possible that BH mass estimates are incorrect…
The possible existence of primordial black holes (PBHs) is an open question in modern cosmology. Among the probes to test it, gravitational waves (GW) coming from their mergers constitute a powerful tool. In this work, we study how stellar…
Recent numerical simulations of coalescences of highly spinning massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) suggest that the remnant can suffer a recoil velocity of the order of few thousands km/s. We study here, by means of dedicated simulations…
Gravitational waves (GWs) have provided a new lens through which to view the universe beyond traditional electromagnetic methods. The upcoming space-based gravitational wave mission, Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), will give us…
Recent studies have shown that during their coalescence, binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) experience a gravitational recoil with velocities of 100 km/s < v(kick) < 600 km/s. These velocities exceed the escape velocity v(esc) from…
The discovery of luminous quasars at redshifts up to 7.5 demonstrates the existence of several billion M_sun supermassive black holes (SMBHs) less than a billion years after the Big Bang. They are accompanied by intense star formation in…
We investigate the consequences of a model of the assembly and growth of massive black holes from primordial seeds, remnants of the first generation of stars in a hierarchical structure formation scenario. Our model traces the build-up of…
Observations of massive galaxies at low redshift have revealed approximately linear scaling relations between the mass of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) and properties of its host galaxy. How these scaling relations evolve with redshift…
Observations of high-redshift quasars at z>6 imply that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses over a billion solar masses were in place less than 1 Gyr after the Big Bang. If these SMBHs assembled from "seed" BHs left behind by the…
We measure host galaxy stellar masses for a sample of five luminous quasars at $z\sim5-7$. Using JWST/NIRCam medium-band images of nearby PSF reference stars, we carefully subtract the contribution from the quasar light to place upper and…
Using few-body simulations, we investigate the evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxies ($M_{\star}=10^{10}-10^{12}{\rm M}_{\odot}$ at $z=0$) at $0<z<4$. Following galaxy merger trees from the Millennium simulation, we…
We analyze the emission line profiles detected in deep optical spectra of quasars to derive the mass of their super-massive black holes (SMBH) following the single-epoch virial method. Our sample consists in 6 radio-loud quasars and 4…
I review the current status of quasar black hole (BH) mass estimations. Spectroscopic methods have been developed to estimate BH mass in broad line quasars to an accuracy of ~0.5 dex. Despite their popularity, significant issues and…
I investigate whether useful constraints on the evolution of the relationship between galaxy mass and black hole (BH) mass can be obtained from recent measurements of galaxy stellar mass functions and QSO bolometric luminosity functions at…
Gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences (CBCs) can constrain the cosmic expansion of the universe. In the absence of an associated electromagnetic counterpart, the spectral sirens method exploits the relation between the…
We study the expected distribution of massive black hole (MBH) spins and its evolution with cosmic time in the context of hierarchical galaxy formation theories. Our model uses Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy in a LCDM…
Recent measurements of the dark matter halo masses of infrared-selected obscured quasars are in tension --- some indicate that obscured quasars have higher halo mass compared to their unobscured counterparts, while others find no…
We investigate the coupled formation and evolution of galaxies and their embedded supermassive black holes using state-of-the-art hydrodynamic simulations of cosmological structure formation. For the first time, we self-consistently follow…