Related papers: Quasars and galaxy formation
Supermassive black holes are probably present in the centre of the majority of the galaxies. There is a consensus that these exotic objects are formed by the growth of seeds either by accreting mass from a circumnuclear disk and/or by…
Cosmic voids, the largest under-dense structures in the Universe, are crucial for exploring galaxy evolution. These vast, sparsely populated regions are home to void galaxies -- predominantly gas-rich, star-forming, and blue -- that evolve…
The ongoing debate regarding the most accurate accretion model for supermassive black holes at the center of quasars has remained a contentious issue in astrophysics. One significant challenge is the variation in calculated accretion…
We follow the evolution of the Black Hole mass function in the assumption that mass accretion onto a massive BH is the powering mechanism of AGN activity. With reasonable assumptions suggested by current knowledge, it is possible to…
High-resolution N-body simulations of hierarchical clustering in a wide variety of cosmogonies show that the density profiles of dark matter halos are universal, with low mass halos being denser than their more massive counterparts. This…
The growth of supermassive black holes (BHs) located at the centers of their host galaxies comes mainly from accretion of gas, but how to fuel them remains an outstanding unsolved problem in quasar evolution. This issue can be elucidated by…
In this paper we review a new scenario for the formation of massive black hole seeds that relies on multi-scale gas inflows initiated by the merger of massive gas-rich galaxies at $z > 6$, where gas has already achieved solar composition.…
Recent X-ray observations of intense high-speed outflows in quasars suggest that supercritical accretion on to the central black hole may have an important effect on a host galaxy. I revisit some ideas of Silk and Rees, and assume such…
We study the growth of supermassive black holes accounting for both accretion and mergers. The former is informed by observations of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) and the latter by the gravitational wave-background (GWB) recently…
Black holes with masses M_BH~10^{8.5} M_Sun dominate the accretion history of the Universe. These black hole masses are typical of those found in radio-selected galaxies today, suggesting that the giant elliptical hosts of low redshift…
We describe a physical model of the outflows produced as a result of gas accretion onto a black hole, and the resultant changes to star formation rates and efficiencies in galaxies, using the Radio-SAGE semi-analytic galaxy formation model.…
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…
According to a currently popular paradigm, nuclear activity in quasars is sustained via accretion of material onto super-massive black holes located at the quasar nuclei. A useful tracer of the gravitational field in the vicinity of such…
We use hydrodynamic simulations to examine how the baryonic components of galaxies are assembled, focusing on the relative importance of mergers and smooth accretion in the formation of ~L_* systems. In our primary simulation, which models…
Quasars are powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes, but the problem of the duty cycle related to the episodic activity of the black holes remains open as one of the major questions of cosmological evolution of quasars. In this…
(ABRIDGED) We present a model in which the seeds of supermassive black holes form from the lowest angular momentum gas in proto-galaxies at high redshift. We show that this leads to a correlation between black hole masses and spheroid…
The evolution of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) is fundamental to understanding the cosmic evolution of black holes (BHs) through their accretion phases. In the era of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Euclid, and Nancy Grace…
We examine possible phenomenological constraints for the joint evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBH) and their host spheroids. We compare all the available observational data on the redshift evolution of the total stellar mass and…
Quasars (QSOs) emit an enormous amount of light as a result of the accretion of gas onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Thanks to their luminosity, the most distant known QSOs allow us to trace the growth of SMBHs deep into the epoch of…
Recent quasar surveys have revealed that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) rarely exceed a mass of $M_{\rm BH} \sim {\rm a~few}\times10^{10}~M_{\odot}$ during the entire cosmic history. It has been argued that quenching of the BH growth is…