2017/11/30 by Alexander Spacek, Mark L. A. Richardson, Mark Richardson +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Cosmology #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Large Synoptic Survey Telescope #Measure (data warehouse) #Telescope #Thermal #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aada01
12 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ
openalex created_date 2017/12/04 · arxiv created 2018/08/11 · openalex publication_date 2018/09/27 · arxiv updated 2018/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract Energetic feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is often used in simulations to resolve several outstanding issues in galaxy formation, but its impact is still not fully understood. Here, we derive new constraints on AGN feedback by comparing observations and simulations of the thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect. We draw on previous observational results that used data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) to measure the tSZ signal from ≥10 11 M ⊙ and ≥1 Gyr galaxies at z = 0.5–1.0 (low- z ) and z = 1.0–1.5 (high- z ). Using the large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulations Horizon-AGN and Horizon-NoAGN, which include and omit AGN feedback, we extract simulated tSZ measurements around galaxies equivalent to the observational work. We find that the Horizon-AGN results only differ from the SPT measurements at levels of 0.4 σ (low- z ) and 0.6 σ (high- z ), but differ from the ACT measurements by 3.4 σ (low- z ) and 2.3 σ (high- z ). The Horizon-noAGN results provide a slightly better fit to the SPT measurements by differing by 0.2 σ (low- z ) and 0.4 σ (high- z ), but are a significantly better match to the ACT measurements by differing by only 0.5 σ (low- z ) and 1.4 σ (high- z ). We conclude that, while the lower-mass (≲5 × 10 11 M ⊙ ) SPT results allow for the presence AGN feedback energy, the higher-mass (≳5 × 10 11 M ⊙ ) ACT results show significantly less energy than predicted in the simulation including AGN feedback, while more closely matching the simulation without AGN feedback, indicating that AGN feedback may be milder than often predicted in simulations.