The Assembly and Merging History of Supermassive Black Holes in Hierarchical Models of Galaxy Formation | Zendy

Marta Volonteri | Zendy; Francesco Haardt | Zendy; Piero Madau | Zendy

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The Assembly and Merging History of Supermassive Black Holes in Hierarchical Models of Galaxy Formation

Author(s) -

Marta Volonteri,

Francesco Haardt,

Piero Madau

Publication year - 2003

Publication title -

the astrophysical journal

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 2.376

H-Index - 489

eISSN - 1538-4357

pISSN - 0004-637X

DOI - 10.1086/344675

Subject(s) - physics , astrophysics , supermassive black hole , quasar , reionization , dark matter , astronomy , halo , galaxy , redshift , galaxy formation and evolution , galaxy merger

We assess models for the assembly of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at thecenter of galaxies that trace their hierarchical build-up far up in the darkhalo `merger tree'. We assume that the first `seed' black holes (BHs) formed in(mini)halos collapsing at z=20 from high-sigma density fluctuations. As thesepregalactic holes become incorporated through a series of mergers into largerand larger halos, they sink to the center owing to dynamical friction, accretea fraction of the gas in the merger remnant to become supermassive, form abinary system, and eventually coalesce. The merger history of dark matter halosand associated BHs is followed by cosmological Monte Carlo realizations of themerger hierarchy. A simple model, where quasar activity is driven by majormergers and SMBHs accrete at the Eddington rate a mass that scales with thefifth power of the velocity dispersion, is shown to reproduce the optical LF ofquasars in the redshift range 1

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