GMU Space Sciences Seminar

April 13, 2005

Dr. Richard Mushotzky
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center

"The Accretion History of Massive Black Holes"

TALK ABSTRACT:
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We use highly spectroscopically complete deep and wide-area Chandra surveys 
to determine the cosmic evolution of hard X-ray-selected AGNs and determine 
hard X-ray luminosity functions. Our results are a revolution in AGN demography
since we find that the number of, location of, evolution of, and nature of AGN 
are very different from those found in pre-2001 classical AGN surveys.

At z<1.2, both the luminosity functions are well described by pure luminosity 
evolution.  On average AGNs drop in luminosity by almost an order of magnitude 
over this redshift range due to AGN downsizing.  Contrary to optical surveys 
the energy density of AGN radiation drops at z>1.2.  The areal density of all 
objects is ~7 times larger than in "classical" color selected AGN surveys. 
The host galaxies of the x-ray selected objects at all redshifts tend to be 
drawn from the most luminous galaxies.

We directly compare our luminosity function of optical broad-line objects 
with the optical QSO ones and find excellent agreement at high luminosities. 
BLAGNs dominate the number densities at the higher X-ray luminosities, while 
optically-narrow AGNs (FWHM<2000 km/s) dominate at the lower X-ray 
luminosities. We use the nuclear UV/optical properties of the Chandra sources
from the HST ACS GOODS-North data to show that this effect is not due to 
galaxy dilution and only ~1/2 of the AGN nuclei are detected in the HST data.
The UV/optical nuclei of the optically-narrow AGNs are much weaker than 
expected if they were similar to the BLAGNs.

We infer the bolometric corrections needed to map the accretion history of 
black holes. The accreted supermassive black hole mass density for all 
spectral types and for BLAGNs alone is obtained using the observed evolution 
of the hard X-ray energy density production rate and only ~1/4-1/2 of all the 
accretion energy is produced by optically color selected objects. The sum of 
the total mass for the x-ray selected objects is very close to the z=0 rest 
mass energy density of all black holes leaving little room for other sources 
of black hole mass.

We derive the 3-D correlation function of the x-ray selected objects in 
four redshift shells and compare it to the 2dF samples and despite the very 
different sample selection obtain similar results.