Modeling the cosmological co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies: II. The clustering of quasars and their dark environment

TL;DR

This study uses semi-analytic models on the Millennium simulation to analyze quasar clustering, finding that bright quasars' spatial distribution aligns with galaxy merger-triggered black hole activity, with clustering weakly dependent on luminosity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of quasar clustering using simulations, testing merger-triggered accretion models and their consistency with observations.

Findings

Quasar two-point correlation function fits a power-law across scales.

Clustering strength of quasars weakly depends on luminosity.

Results support galaxy mergers as a primary trigger for quasar activity.

Abstract

We use semi-analytic modeling on top of the Millennium simulation to study the joint formation of galaxies and their embedded supermassive black holes. Our goal is to test scenarios in which black hole accretion and quasar activity are triggered by galaxy mergers, and to constrain different models for the lightcurves associated with individual quasar events. In the present work we focus on studying the spatial distribution of simulated quasars. At all luminosities, we find that the simulated quasar two-point correlation function is fit well by a single power-law in the range 0.5 < r < 20 h^{-1} Mpc, but its normalization is a strong function of redshift. When we select only quasars with luminosities within the range typically accessible by today's quasar surveys, their clustering strength depends only weakly on luminosity, in agreement with observations. This holds independently of the assumed lightcurve model, since bright quasars are black holes accreting close to the Eddington limit, and are hosted by dark matter haloes with a narrow mass range of a few 10^12 h^{-1} M_sun. Therefore the clustering of bright quasars cannot be used to disentangle lightcurve models, but such a discrimination would become possible if the observational samples can be pushed to significantly fainter limits. Overall, our clustering results for the simulated quasar population agree rather well with observations, lending support to the conjecture that galaxy mergers could be the main physical process responsible for triggering black hole accretion and quasar activity.