The role of scatter and satellites in shaping the large-scale clustering of X-ray AGN as a function of host galaxy stellar mass

2021/09/06 by A. Viitanen, Akke Viitanen, Viola Allevato +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Active galactic nucleus #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Physics #Satellite galaxy #Star formation #Stellar mass #Supermassive black hole #astro-ph.GA

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/stab2538

14 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

arxiv created 2021/09/06 · openalex publication_date 2021/09/08 · arxiv updated 2021/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

ABSTRACT The co-evolution between central supermassive black holes (BHs), their host galaxies, and dark matter haloes is still a matter of intense debate. Present theoretical models suffer from large uncertainties and degeneracies, for example, between the fraction of accreting sources and their characteristic accretion rate. In recent work, we showed that active galactic nuclei (AGNs) clustering represents a powerful tool to break degeneracies when analysed in terms of mean BH mass, and that AGN bias at fixed stellar mass is largely independent of most of the input parameters, such as the AGN duty cycle and the mean scaling between BH mass and host galaxy stellar mass. In this paper, we take advantage of our improved semi-empirical methodology and recent clustering data derived from large AGN samples at z ∼ 1.2, demonstrate that the AGN bias as a function of host galaxy stellar mass is a crucial diagnostic of the BH–galaxy connection, and is highly dependent on the scatter around the BH mass–galaxy mass scaling relation and on the relative fraction of satellite and central active BHs. Current data at z ∼ 1.2 favour relatively high values of AGN in satellites, pointing to a major role of disc instabilities in triggering AGN, unless a high minimum host halo mass is assumed. The data are not decisive on the magnitude/covariance of the BH–galaxy scatter at z ∼ 1.2 and intermediate host masses M_star \lesssim 10¹¹ M_star. However, future surveys like Euclid/LSST will be pivotal in shedding light on the BH–galaxy co-evolution.

Citations

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