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Published October 10, 2022 | Version public
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BASS. XXXVI. Constraining the Local Supermassive Black Hole-Halo Connection with BASS DR2 AGNs

Creators

Abstract

We investigate the connection between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host dark matter halos in the local universe using the clustering statistics and luminosity function of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) from the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS DR2). By forward-modeling AGN activity into snapshot halo catalogs from N-body simulations, we test a scenario in which SMBH mass correlates with dark matter (sub)halo mass for fixed stellar mass. We compare this to a model absent of this correlation, where stellar mass alone determines the SMBH mass. We find that while both simple models are able to largely reproduce the abundance and overall clustering of AGNs, the model in which black hole mass is tightly correlated with halo mass is preferred by the data by 1.8σ. When including an independent measurement on the black hole mass–halo mass correlation, this model is preferred by 4.6σ. We show that the clustering trends with black hole mass can further break the degeneracies between the two scenarios and that our preferred model reproduces the measured clustering differences on one-halo scales between large and small black hole masses. These results indicate that the halo binding energy is fundamentally connected to the growth of SMBHs.

Additional Information

We thank the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments that improved the paper. M.P. thanks Risa Weschler for helpful discussions. We acknowledge support from NASA through ADAP award NNH16CT03C (M.K.) and NASA-Swift 80NSSC18K0505 (N.C.); the Israel Science Foundation through grant No. 1849/19 (B.T.); the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, through grant agreement No. 950533 (B.T.); ANID grants CATA-Basal FB210003 (C.R.); Fondecyt Iniciacion grant 11190831 (C.R.); the National Research Foundation of Korea grant NRF-2020R1C1C1005462; and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science ID: 17321 (K.O.). We acknowledge the work done by the 50+ BASS scientists and Swift-BAT team to make this project possible. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (www.Gauss-center.eu) and the Partnership for Advanced Supercomputing in Europe (PRACE, www.prace-ri.eu) for funding the MultiDark simulation project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer SuperMUC at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ, www.lrz.de). The CosmoSim database used in this paper is a service by the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). The MultiDark database was developed in cooperation with the Spanish MultiDark Consolider Project CSD2009-00064.

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
117576
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20221025-328264200.2

Funding

NASA
NNH16CT03C
NASA
80NSSC18K0505
Israel Science Foundation
1849/19
European Research Council (ERC)
950533
Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID)
FB210003
Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT)
11190831
National Research Foundation of Korea
NRF-2020R1C1C1005462
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
17321
MultiDark
CSD2009-00064

Dates

Created
2022-11-03
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2022-11-04
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Astronomy Department, Space Radiation Laboratory