Related papers: Cosmological Evolution of Quasars
A dark-matter-only Horizon Project simulation is used to investigate the environment- and redshift- dependence of accretion onto both halos and subhalos. These objects grow in the simulation via mergers and via accretion of diffuse non-halo…
Last year (2013) was more or less the 50th anniversary of the discovery of quasars. It is an interesting time to review what we know (and don't know) about them both empirically and theoretically. These compact sources involving line…
We use the integrated spectrum of the X-ray background and quasars Spectral Energy Distribution to derive the contribution of quasars to the energy output of the Universe. We find a lower limit for the energy from accretion onto black holes…
Quasars (QSOs) are extremely luminous active galatic nuclei currently observed up to redshift $z=7.642$. As such, they have the potential to be the next rung of the cosmic distance ladder beyond SNe Ia, if they can reliably be used as…
We have analyzed the evolution of mass of a stationary black hole in the standard FRW cosmological model. The evolution is determined specifically about the time of transition from the earlier matter to the later exotic dark energy…
Red quasars are thought to be an intermediate population between merger-driven star-forming galaxies in dust-enshrouded phase and normal quasars. If so, they are expected to have high accretion ratios, but their intrinsic dust extinction…
Quasars are high-luminosity active galactic nuclei believed to be powered by accretion of interstellar matter onto a super-massive black hole (SMBH) therein. Most of the observed energy is released in an accretion disk of inspiralling gas…
A new theory of quasars is presented in which the matter of thin accretion disks around black holes is supplied by stars that plunge through the disk. Stars in the central part of the host galaxy are randomly perturbed to highly radial…
We investigate the predictions for the faint-end quasar luminosity function (QLF) and its evolution using fully cosmological hydrodynamic simulations which self-consistently follow star formation, black hole growth and associated feedback…
Recent work on red and blue quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) has identified peculiar number distributions as a function of radio loudness that we explore and attempt to explain from the perspective of a picture in which a subset of the…
Observational constraints on the birth and early evolution of massive black holes (BHs) come from two extreme regimes. At high redshift, quasars signal the rapid growth of billion-solar-mass BHs and indicate that these objects began…
We employ a flexible Bayesian technique to estimate the black hole mass and Eddington ratio functions for Type 1 (i.e., broad line) quasars from a uniformly-selected data set of ~58,000 quasars from the SDSS DR7. We find that the SDSS…
I present a new method to unveil the history of cosmic accretion and the build-up of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) in the nuclei of galaxies, based on observations of the evolving radio and (hard) X-ray luminosity functions of AGN. The…
A picture has emerged connecting QSOs with Sub-Millimetre Galaxies (SMGs) through an evolutionary sequence in which forming galaxies are initially FIR-luminous but X-ray weak, similar to known SMGs. As the black hole and spheroid grow with…
The uncertain origin of the recently-discovered `changing-looking' quasar phenomenon -- in which a luminous quasar dims significantly to a quiescent state in repeat spectroscopy over ~10 year timescales -- may present unexpected challenges…
In the local universe, the masses of Super-Massive Black-Holes (SMBH) appear to correlate with physical properties of their hosts, including the mass of the dark-matter halos. At higher redshifts, we observe the growth of SMBHs indirectly…
Observations of the most luminous quasars at high redshifts ($z > 6$) have revealed that the largest supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at those epochs tend to be substantially overmassive relative to their host galaxies compared to the local…
Powered by supermassive black holes at their centers, quasars are among the most luminous objects in the Universe, serving as important probes of cosmic history and galaxy evolution. The size of the accretion disc surrounding the black hole…
By using AMR cosmological hydrodynamic N-body zoom-in simulations, with the RAMSES code, we studied the mass transport processes onto galactic nuclei from high redshift up to $z\sim6$. Due to the large dynamical range of the simulations we…
High-$z$ AGNs hosted in gas rich galaxies are expected to grow through significantly obscured accretion phases. This may limit or bias their observability. In this work, we use \textsc{BlueTides}, a large volume cosmological simulation of…