The cosmological co-evolution of supermassive black holes, AGN and galaxies

TL;DR

This paper presents a semi-analytical model of the co-evolution of supermassive black holes, galaxies, and AGN within a cosmological framework, showing good agreement with observational data across multiple properties and redshifts.

Contribution

It extends existing models to include black hole accretion and AGN luminosity evolution, providing a comprehensive comparison with recent observations.

Findings

Model BH scaling relations match observations.

AGN luminosity function aligns with observed data.

Good agreement with BH mass functions and galaxy properties.

Abstract

We model the cosmological co-evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes (BHs) within a semi-analytical framework developed on the outputs of the Millennium Simulation (Croton et al., 2006; De Lucia & Blaizot, 2007). In this work, we analyze the model BH scaling relations, fundamental plane and mass function, and compare them with the most recent observational data. Furthermore, we extend the original code developed by Croton et al. (2006) to follow the evolution of the BH mass accretion and its conversion into radiation, and compare the derived AGN bolometric luminosity function with the observed one. We find, for the most part, a very good agreement between predicted and observed BH properties. Moreover, the model is in good agreement with the observed AGN number density in 0<z<5, provided it is assumed that the cold gas fraction accreted by BHs at high redshifts is larger than at low redshifts (Marulli et al., 2008).